Battery Breakthrough: Researchers Claim 70% Charge In 2 Minutes, 20-Year Life

New submitter chaosdivine69 writes: According to Scientists at Nanyang Technology University (NTU), they have developed ultra-fast charging batteries that can be recharged up to 70 per cent in only two minutes and have a 20-year lifespan (10,000 charges). The impact of this is potentially a game changer for a lot of industries reliant on lithium ion batteries. In the car industry, for example, consumers would save on costs for battery replacement and manufacturers would save on material construction (the researchers are using a nanotube structure of Titanium dioxide, which is an abundant, cheap, and safe material found in soil). Titanium dioxide is commonly used as a food additive or in sunscreen lotions to absorb harmful ultraviolet rays. It is believed that charging an electric car can be done in as little as 5 minutes, making it comparable to filling up a tank of gasoline.

Comments

No mention on capacity though

[Obscene_CNN]

No mention on capacity though. If its capacity is low enough the these claims are easy to achieve.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[gaelfx]

...Prof Chen's new cross-linked titanium dioxide nanotube-based electrodes eliminate the need for these additives and can pack more energy into the same amount of space.

Seems like it should be, at the very least, on par with current capacities, if not greater. You are correct though, there does not seem to be a direct statement regarding capacity, making me very suspicious.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[olsmeister]

It's still a lithium ion battery, they've just changed the material being used for the anode.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, they say it lasts 20 years, which they equate to 10000 charges. That suggests that the batteries need to be recharged once every 17.5 hours.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[grantspassalan]

Even if it did have enough capacity, it would take a 2 MW power supply to charge a 100 kW battery in five minutes, assuming there were no losses. A “gas station” that could “fill” five electric cars simultaneously would have to have a 10 MW grid connection. I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Half-pint HAL]

That's a bit harsh. It could have been a typo, or he could have just had a crap teacher in high school physics.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[beelsebob]

That seems pretty reasonable if you're talking about a car with a decent range. It may even be overkill.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

Your math sucks.

Assuming you mean a 100kWh battery, it would take only 1.2MW to charge in five minutes, assuming no losses (which is an unrealistic assumption).

If you meant a 100kW battery, and it was a 1/10C battery, it would only take 120kW to charge it in 5 minutes, though the utility of a 1/10C battery in an electric car seems doubtful.

To charge 5 cars simultaneously, it would take 6MW, not 10MW.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you mean a 100kW/hr battery? There is no such thing as a 100kW battery. Idiot.

There is no such thing as 100kW/hr battery. There is a 100kWh battery.

If you are going to call people idiots, it's best not to be one.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[sumdumass]

Or a bank of capacitors that collected energy to be released over time.

Still not happening any time soon but could cut down on the size and make it more of a reality sooner than later. Of course that is assuming a capacitor of sufficient size exists and is safe enough to be used.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[the_other_chewey]

Do you mean a 100kW/hr battery? There is no such thing as a 100kW battery. Idiot.

Neither is there a 100kW/hr battery. Moron.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[ShanghaiBill]

A “gas station” that could “fill” five electric cars simultaneously would have to have a 10 MW grid connection.

A 10MW or larger grid connection is not particularly uncommon. A factory, mall, or large building might need that much. Almost any power company would have some customers with those kind or requirements. If the "gas station" is on a busy street, there might already be nearby lines available.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[ShanghaiBill]

Or a bank of capacitors that collected energy to be released over time.

A flywheel would likely be much cheaper for the same capacity. The energy density of a carbon fiber flywheel is higher than a Li-ion battery of the same size. A bank of capacitors would have to be much bigger.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[colin_faber]

I think they're a lot less common than you assume. There has to be supply as well because we're still talking about serious power here.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

The statement is confusing, for what I read is more like that the battery has a 20 years of self life due to time driven aging or 10000 cycles due to charging driven aging. Both aging processes work in a pretty different ways.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[TheInternetGuy]

Do you mean a 100kW/hr battery? There is no such thing as a 100kW battery. Idiot.

Do you mean a 100kWh (or possibly kW*h) battery? There is no such thing as a 100kW/hr battery. And note that I won't call you an idiot, just because you are wrong.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[rtb61]

Logically you do not charge electric vehicles at a "commercial vehicle charging station" but at any regularly used parking point via induction charging. Obviously any commercial car park would build in induction charges and charge more slowly based upon estimated parking time and combine charging costs with parking costs. Employers would naturally subsidise the cost of the employee car parks by offering vehicle charging, over the life of a car park it makes sense. Even shopping malls could add in metered vehicle induction charging to charge vehicles during their stay. Pretty much the plain 'gas station' would die over time, replaced by diners with charging while you eat, mini marts with charging while you shop, basically any type of business that has to pay for car parks looking to subsidise that cost with induction charging fees.

This battery breakthrough by "TU professor Rachid Yazami, the co-inventor of the lithium-graphite anode", points to exactly why mega battery factories are so financially risky at this time, real battery breakthroughs are coming down the line, that will change everything. Tying into the right technology (now is the right time) and making sure your investment can compete for the next say 15 years is critical.

Not just used in cars of course but also to be used in residential properties to really drive renewable energy sources and people in the burbs being able to escape the grid (where battery life and capacity are everything and charging time is not so important). Most people of course will be charging at home most of the time and as long as fuelling points match dining times and battery capacity, fuelling on road would be pretty much as it already is on long trips.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

when dealing with fly wheels, I'd deal with something like steel myself. Since the energy is effectively being stored in moving mass, why go for an ultra light and very expensive material when a cheap but heavy one would suffice?

Re:No mention on capacity though

[able1234au]

'gas stations' will still have a role for rapid charging but yes, most charging would be trickle charging. If you are travelling long distance, have a problem with your charging at home, are staying at a house without trickle charging etc etc, then there will always be exceptions. And gas stations will still sell petrol, diesel, natural gas etc. But i would expect there will be a lot less of them and they will need to change their business model.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[AaronW]

All it requires is on-site battery or capacitor storage. It makes even more sense since the batteries can be charged when electricity prices are cheap (i.e. at night).

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

More than one place I've worked at had experiments using magnets that ran in the several MW range at several hundred volts. They didn't have any problem with electrical hook up or with the magnets being turned on and off when ever they wanted (they didn't have flywheel storage like some larger experiments do). The wires that ran to the magnets were lift-able by a normal person, even if quite heavy, and could have been made lighter if much shorter. There is some work needed to streamline such equipment and make it reliable for us by a bunch of random customers, but moving that much power around is not as big of a deal as people act like it is.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[gweihir]

Indeed. A standard ceramic capacitor would even have better data, but it would hold almost nothing.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[tibit]

The energy is stored in the moment of inertia, so it being heavy without regard to geometry is not enough. In realistic implementations, you need composite flywheels where something dense is used at the edge, and something stiff and strong is used elsewhere.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

Wonder what the failure would look like between steel and carbon fiber. I imagine carbon fiber somewhat disintegrating, where the steel would just head down the road, cutting cars in half.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[icebike]

Moving all of the energy that a 85 kW-hr lithium-ion EV battery can hold into a battery in 2 or 5 minutes would require some truly dangerous amperage,
and some enormous amount of heat could be generated.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Krishnoid]

And note that I won't call you an idiot, just because you are wrong

, dumbass.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[angel'o'sphere]

Your math is way off.
2MW power obviously is equivalent to 2MWh if the power is applied for 1h.

So loading a battery with so much energy takes 60/2MW * 100kW minutes which is somewhere around 40 seconds (sorry, did the math in my mind, use a calculator if you need it precisely)

So bottom line a power source of something like 400kW - 500kW is enough to charge such a battery in 5 mins.

Hm, obviously it makes more sense to calculate in the reverse :) how much power do you need to transfer 100kWh in 5 mins ... hm, now I come to 1.2MW ... must have made an error somewhere.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[angel'o'sphere]

They are far more common than YOU believe.
Every bakery, or office building (with something like 100 rooms) has such a connection.
Hint: learn to compare apples with oranges.
A car engine has roughly 100kW. (Usually around, 75kW).
Ten cars are 1MW ... 100 cars are 10MW.
A standard light bulb needs 75W, a computer roughly 400W.

10MW power is NOTHING.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[MildlyTangy]

Moving all of the energy that a 85 kW-hr lithium-ion EV battery can hold into a battery in 2 or 5 minutes would require some truly dangerous amperage,
and some enormous amount of heat could be generated.

Go parallel.

The 85kW battery pack in a Tesla for instance, has a huge bunch of standard lithium ion cells in parallel and in series. Have multiple charger conductors to each charge a section of the entire pack, which reduces the amperage per conductor, but keeps the power input to the whole pack at a maximum.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[MildlyTangy]

10 MW is not an issue, you just need a suitably sized 11kV(for instance) transformer at the station. a 10MW 11kV transformer is nothing special in the power industry. Many factories use similar amounts of power.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

You could just build storage batteries an the charging station. This is actually what Tesla has experimented with at some super charger locations so Tesla can flatten out power it is drawing from the grid. You could make the storage batteries out of these batteries in the article.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[icebike]

Do 4 or 6 plug-ins hanging from each car?
Don't see that happening any time soon.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

Moving all of the energy that a 85 kW-hr lithium-ion EV battery can hold into a battery in 2 or 5 minutes would require some truly dangerous amperage,
and some enormous amount of heat could be generated.

Whoa! That's assuming the resistance of current battery tech to be the same. Clearly it is not with this new titanium dioxide plus sodium hydroxide gel being used. If the resistance was the same then charging times would not be so low. All the team did was replace the anode material with the new stuff and WHAMO! charge time goes to single digit minutes. Nowhere in the article, summary or journal article (free, by the way) does it say that any charging ampere changes are made to get the shortened recharge time.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Will.Woodhull]

Currently high energy flywheels are better suited to stationary installations. Typically the containment enclosure is more massive than the flywheel. IIRC, NYC uses these to store juice from regenerative braking on subways as part of its load leveling.

I would think that freight trains would be a good mobile application for flywheel power. You could probably put several on a freight car in a common containment enclosure, each gimballed so the gyroscopic forces would not be a problem. The amount of energy from regenerative braking while the train descended from the Bakken oil fields to Gulf of Mexico refineries would be significant. At a guess, more than enough to power the pumps that move the crude from the tank cars to the storage tanks. If you could capture a large enough fraction of the braking energy, you would have enough power to send the empty train back to the oil fields. But that is probably unrealistic.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Rei]

In a naive calculation, one can easily determine that the charging cable would be way too heavy and unwieldy for a person to use.

Of course, that's the problem with naive calculations. The solution in practice for very high power charging is very simple, just cool the cable rather than requiring it to be passively air-cooled.

Personally, I think very high-power chargers should also provide coolant for the vehicle, through the charging port. It makes a lot more sense to me to make a small number of chillers (aka, part of the chargers) which can keep a store of coolant than making every single vehicle have to haul around a high power chiller and coolant reservoir. Coolant comes from the charger's reservoir, along its switching electronics, down the cable, into the vehicle, into its pack, and then heated coolant is returned on the cable's return line

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Rei]

It's not at all reasonable to reharge the entire pack every 17.5 hours. If your car has a 200 mile range, and you're charging that fully every 17.5 hours, then you're driving 274 miles per day.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Rei]

And of course, the assumption that if your station's maximum output is 10 MW that you have to have a 10 MW feed to the grid is also wrong. It presumes that you can't have a battery buffer in your station. Look at your typical gas station; pumps spend by far most of their time idle. A charging station with a peak output of 10 MW could probably meet all its needs with a 2 MW feed and a 20-minute battery buffer (although a statistical analysis of consumption patterns would be required for specifics)

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

>Every bakery, or office building (with something like 100 rooms) has such a connection.
This is complete bullshit.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Rei]

This is not going to suddenly "change everything". First off, there's so little info here you can't even see through the hype. There's nothing to get an idea of how hard this would be to commercialize, what its energy density would be, or any of tons of other things that make a big difference. And secondly, these are hardly the first lab-scale batteries to have properties like this. Heck, there have even been lithium titanate batteries commercialized before. Crazy charge / discharge times, but they were largely a flop except in niche applications - the cost was way too high and the energy density too low.

There is every week or two some great research breakthrough in battery storage. Most of them you'll never read about. Most of them will never go anywhere. But a few will. And they will slowly, inevitably make their way into the battery technology of tomorrow. Silicon anodes, for example, were once among those crazy lab future battery techs. Now they're in commercial cells. People never stop to think about how little the batteries in their phones have gotten in an area of increasing computing power, larger screens, greater demands on lifespan, etc. Energy density continues its inevitable march.... in the background. But the odds that any one tech that you read about is going to carry the industry is very small. And these things take half a decade to go from the lab to stores.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[exploder]

So every bakery is spending half a million dollars an hour on electricity? That doesn't pass the sniff test.

Re: No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

Carbon nantube cables should be used. They are stronger, lighter and have less resistance.

Re: No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

A reasonable number of miles.

Re: No mention on capacity though

[Camembert]

After driving 200 miles it is good practice to stop for a few minutes so this recharching should fit right in.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, I'm Elon Musk, and I just shit my pants.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[ArmoredDragon]

In a naive calculation, one can easily determine that the charging cable would be way too heavy and unwieldy for a person to use.

More unwieldy than today's petrol hoses? I could see a scenario where we use 6 AWG cabling with two hot and one neutral wire, which would be capable of a LOT of amperage (say about 120 combined amps, which is enough to e.g. power two pretty heavy duty HVACs at the same time with room to spare) and would still be thinner than a typical petrol hose. As for how heavy...eh...about the same I'd guess.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[ArmoredDragon]

And yet it still wouldn't be enough for this guy:

http://www.foxnews.com/leisure...

Re:No mention on capacity though

[m00j]

USA electricity pricing is 8 - 17 cents / kWh (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...). So let's say $0.2 per kWh
10MW = 10,000 kW. So if you were using the full 10MW connection that would cost $2000 per hour. I'm sure if you are using that much you get a special rate.

From a quick search I found this PDF: https://www.ergon.com.au/__dat...
For that particular 26500m^2 shopping centre their energy usage was 4000 kVA, which is 4MW. There are at least 9 shopping centres in Australia that are 5x larger than that in terms of m^2.

So yes, there definitely are connections of that magnitude delivering continuous power. And they are not all that uncommon.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[EETech1]

10 MW is only 400 Amps @ 14400 Volts.
Pretty typical for industry.

Anything over 2.5 MW and you are going to have to get more than 480 Volt service anyways, that's 3000 Amps. The cost of the wire you would need to run would easily pay for a transformer.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[DigiShaman]

Depends on the area and at what time of the day. It's not uncommon for me to see a gas station where there's at least five cars filling up at any given time. At worst, there a few cars parked behind someone else waiting their turn. So while yes, you could have a battery for your battery (Yo Dog!), it would have to be one giant battery bank underground. That or a massive collection of flywheel covering the KE into electricity upon demand.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[beelsebob]

Are you claiming you drive more than 274 miles average every single day for 20 years running?

Re:No mention on capacity though

[beelsebob]

Sure it would –it just wouldn't last 20 years. With charging in a few minutes, I think he's perfectly capable of charging it while he's working. So that's 2 charges a day, or one every 12 hours. That means it'll last 13.7 years. To be honest, that's a pretty reasonable length of time for a car.

Re: No mention on capacity though

[mattwarden]

I do not follow your comment. I do not know what it means to charge different portions of a battery at the same time in parallel. Either they are connected cells into a single battery, or they aren't. If they are connected, then there is only one battery and your comment doesn't make sense to me. I think gp is correct that we are talking higher current.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[ooshna]

Or I don't know maybe one plug with multiple conductor pins or what-not that separate the charge.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[icebike]

Put a hundred connectors in. Same problem.
Too many amps in too short of time.
Are you going to cover the entire rear end of the car with a 4 foot wide connector? How is that going to sell?

Re:No mention on capacity though

[David_Hart]

This is not going to suddenly "change everything". First off, there's so little info here you can't even see through the hype. There's nothing to get an idea of how hard this would be to commercialize, what its energy density would be, or any of tons of other things that make a big difference. And secondly, these are hardly the first lab-scale batteries to have properties like this. Heck, there have even been lithium titanate batteries commercialized before. Crazy charge / discharge times, but they were largely a flop except in niche applications - the cost was way too high and the energy density too low.

There is every week or two some great research breakthrough in battery storage. Most of them you'll never read about. Most of them will never go anywhere. But a few will. And they will slowly, inevitably make their way into the battery technology of tomorrow. Silicon anodes, for example, were once among those crazy lab future battery techs. Now they're in commercial cells. People never stop to think about how little the batteries in their phones have gotten in an area of increasing computing power, larger screens, greater demands on lifespan, etc. Energy density continues its inevitable march.... in the background. But the odds that any one tech that you read about is going to carry the industry is very small. And these things take half a decade to go from the lab to stores.

Battery tech slowly evolves and gradually gets better. There have been few leaps in battery tech over the last 20 or so years, despite other such announcements. Like you, I am also skeptical that this is a true breakthrough. However, it would be amazing if it can be scaled up.

The one thing that I disagree with in your comment is the premise that batteries in cell phones have gotten smaller due to battery tech. It is partially true. However, the majority of energy gains in cell phones have been the huge leaps in low power ever-shrinking electronics and battery saving technologies (components being able to go to sleep).

If battery tech had kept pace with electronics, we would be able to power our cell phones for weeks instead of just a couple of days.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[ChrisMaple]

Power companies don't like rapidly changing loads. It makes voltage regulation difficult, and requires a larger on-line power margin.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[ChrisMaple]

When every penny counts, induction charging is a poor choice. Some of the field is always going to leak, and there are going to be losses in the coil windings and cores. A heavy pickup coil in the vehicle is also not optimum.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[fluffy99]

85 KW*hr in 5 minutes is about a megawatt of power. Even at 10,000 volts, you're talking 100 amps.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Circlotron]

Do 4 or 6 plug-ins hanging from each car? Don't see that happening any time soon.

Like a cow on a milking machine.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[fluffy99]

Going by http://www.nacsonline.com/Your..., an average gas station pumps 3000 gallons of gas. Or 4400 in CA http://energyalmanac.ca.gov/ga...

3000 Gallons of gas = about 110 MW*H. Averaged over 24 hours = 4.6 Megawatts.
4400 Gallons of gas = about 161 MW*H. Averaged over 24 hours = 6.7 Megawatts.

Buffering would have to be pretty big, considering surges of customers.

Re: No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to compare the efficiency of the gasoline and electrical engine. In a gasoline engine, most of this energy is discarded as heat.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

They are far more common than YOU believe.
Every bakery, or office building (with something like 100 rooms) has such a connection.
Hint: learn to compare apples with oranges.
A car engine has roughly 100kW. (Usually around, 75kW).
Ten cars are 1MW ... 100 cars are 10MW.
A standard light bulb needs 75W, a computer roughly 400W.

10MW power is NOTHING.

An office building with 'something like 100' rooms uses enough electricity to run 25,000 computers?

I know this is slashdot, lots of us probably have more than one computer, but 250 each seems a bit excessive...

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

Please tell us more about this alternate universe where electrical power costs $50 per kWh.

(This goes out not only to the crackpot above, but to the people who modded him up.)

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are going to call people idiots, it's best not to be one.

Why not? I'd call that expert knowledge.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

Battery charge and discharge is not 100% efficient, so you could have battery storage but you will increase the effective cost for electricity.
      And for high efficiency, high performance, instant delivery, I think flywheels were better than batteries anyway in terms of both cost and total efficiency.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

i have 100-300 amp equip at my restaurant, my hydro bill for running it 18hrs a day, is still cheaper than my gas bill

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Nirvelli]

Well the Tesla Superchargers are "capable of charging up to 400 volts at 250 amps" so 100 amps is no problem.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

Because we can extract a few scaling relations from dimensional analysis:
m ~ xi r rho: for a thin hoop of cross section xi, radius r and density rho
E ~ m r^2 ^2 : the energy stored in a ring of mass m, radius r spinning at rate
(rho r xi) r ^2 / xi ~ Setting the centrifugal force over the cross section xi equal to the yield strength puts the limit on omega before it flies apart

Then the energy stored behaves as (rho r xi) r^2 (sigma /r^2 rho) ~ xi r sigma: The only way to store more kinetic energy in a rotor of fixed dimension is to make it stronger. Any composite of denser and stronger materials will have a mean density and mean yield strength - so you always just use the strongest possible material.

This is why modern flywheel storage systems use carbon fiber rotors running at ~100000 RPM: That's pretty much the strongest material that can be formed and/or machined into a rotor shape and have bearings attached to it.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

... And who was I kidding? Of course slashdot's shitcode dropped the omegas. If something seems to be missing, put an omega in mentally and it'll make more sense.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[umafuckit]

I think I see a flaw in your plan...

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

Wholesaling at $.10/KW-hr, a 10000KW resistive load burns $1000/hr. How on earth did you come up with $500K?

Re: No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay so it can charge at 100kw. Thats still a park-n-charge scenario. Best case the tesla charges 40% to full in 30 minutes.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[thegarbz]

The number doesn't matter. Surface area matters.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you mean a 100kW/hr battery? There is no such thing as a 100kW battery. Idiot.

If you mean a 100 kWh battery, then write it that way. There's no such thing as a 100 kW per hour battery. Idiot yourself.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Ihlosi]

Or a bank of capacitors that collected energy to be released over time.

If you have access to capacitors advanced enough to make this feasible, why should you bother putting batteries in cars?

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

100 amperes is a manageable value.
It's not uncommon for CPUs to use more than a 100 amperes on the core voltage. That is of course over a much shorter distance so the voltage drop and power loss in the traces will be much smaller in comparison, but on the other hand a car charging cable can be much thicker.
Anyway, on low voltages currents over 100 ampere is used everywhere. For continuous usage the power cable to your house is probably designed for slightly more.
But we aren't talking about continuous usage, we are talking about 5 minutes. That means that cooling can be done by increasing the thermal mass and then dissipate the heat over a longer time.

Re: No mention on capacity though

[aXis100]

The Tesla battery pack is made up of small individual cells. Multiple cells in parallel provide higher current and total amp-hours, and long strings of these parallel cells are used to achieve the high voltages used to drive the motors

Now, whilst the main battery discharge terminals may treat the battery as a single unit, smaller monitoring and charging cables can actually be connected to individual clusters of cells. A sensible way of doing this is to connect to across each parallel set of cells. The differntial voltage across each parallel set can then be monitored, and during charging you can use an isolated DC-DC converter to put more power into some sets than others to keep their voltages balanced.

Remote control hobby batteries are often wired this way, for example a 4S1P (4 series 1 parallel) pack will have two main battery terminals, and 5 balancing terminals. A car battery may have the same concept but be configured as 100S10P.

Re: No mention on capacity though

[SalafranceUnderhill]

With respect, you don't understand enough about the possibilities. If you look up a circuit called a Cockcroft-Walton Voltage Multiplier, you'll find that it represents a capacitor/diode array where the diodes are arranged such that the capacitors are charged in parallel, but discharged in series. Same principle.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[wonkey_monkey]

Like putting too much air into a balloon!

Re:No mention on capacity though

[michelcolman]

OK, some basic electricity:

Power = amps * voltage. Ergo, to load more energy in a shorter time, you either have to use more amps or more voltage.

The Tesla supercharger is already at 400V, I don't think they want to go any higher because otherwise they would. All you need to do is put more cells in series. 400V looks like the highest they're comfortable with.

This means there's only one variable left: more amps. And if, like you say, the resistance of the new batteries is lower, that is precisely what would allow them to use more amps. If resistance is cut in 4, they can use twice the amperage for the same heat generation (per second).

Re:No mention on capacity though

[michelcolman]

And note that I won't call you an idiot, just because you are wrong.

No, but you'd be totally entitled to call him an idiot for calling other people idiots while being wrong himself.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[TheInternetGuy]

And note that I won't call you an idiot, just because you are wrong.

No, but you'd be totally entitled to call him an idiot for calling other people idiots while being wrong himself.

Yeah, I was trying to set some kind of positive precedence.Guess I forgot where I was, Sorry. :-/

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

Tesla model S 85kwh. 70%= 60kwh/240v/120s = 7500A

Re:No mention on capacity though

[paavo512]

This is 400*250 = 100 000W = 100 kW. To transfer 85 kWh one needs almost an hour.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

Geometry matters surprisingly little. The energy density of a flywheel is proportional to the tensile strength of the material divided by density. This formula is valid pretty much regardless of wheel shape. That's why you need something strong (high tensile strength) and light (low density), like carbon fiber or kevlar, instead of steel.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[itzly]

This problem can be solved by using a higher voltage. At 10kV you only need 100A to charge in 5 minutes. Using 10kV sounds dangerous, but it's perfectly safe with the right connector technology. By the way, even high amperage isn't "truly dangerous". The only problem with high amperage (current) is that you need very thick and unwieldy cables.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[itzly]

It doesn't have to happen soon. We're not even close to the point where there are enough people with electric cars that we have to worry about 5 of them pulling up at the same time. The grid can be improved in the meantime.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Alioth]

Several reasons:

* Capacitors may require a lot more space and weigh more for the same stored energy - fine at a fixed installation like a recharging station, but impractical in a car where size is a premium.

* Capacitors don't work like batteries - as you discharge them the voltage falls straight away, requiring more complex power regulation to give a consistent output voltage. Much easier to do in a fixed installation where size and complexity isn't a problem, but much more challenging in the confines of a car. Li-Ion type batteries maintain a reasonably steady voltage throughout their entire discharge cycle.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[thegarbz]

So yes, there definitely are connections of that magnitude delivering continuous power. And they are not all that uncommon.

While you are right the situation is not as easy as you think, and in the grand scheme of things it's not as common as you think. Speaking as someone who is currently jumping through the hurdles of having a 2MW link installed for a large project we are looking at many months worth of investigation and planning work with the local utility. Oh I didn't mention we are setting up this new link in an area with HV powerlines, zoned industrial, where the typical customer supply is in the order of 1-15MW, and we're only 800m from a 33kV substation. Yet it's still an incredible pain to go through as the utility checks capacity and upstream substation requirements, etc.

Yes there are shopping centres around. Yes there are areas which easily use that load. But don't let that fool you into thinking that this means we can simply go and suck 10MW from a cable. In a typical suburb, even on a main road, a sudden 10MW increase in load would require an astounding amount of planning and modifications for a utility. Even interstate where large overhead powerlines are run you'll typically find that they don't feed things along the way, instead step down to one location and then farm out. You can't simply step 180kV down to 190V and be done with it.

What ever the solution is it will involve local energy storage and trickle charging that, and not massive grid connections.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[thegarbz]

Typical for industry. Most petrol stations I know of are not zoned in any kind of industrial area.

This will be ok to do in some area, but don't pretend that we can simply go and plug these into every petrol station.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

The comment was pointing out that 100 amps isn't some impossible to deal with Amperage though.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the energy stored is proportional to the angular velocity. An outer sleeve of carbon fiber around a steel/whatever mass will allow for higher velocities than with a sleeve of high strength steel/inconel/other because of the relatively high breaking strength of carbon fiber.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[AmiMoJo]

They would have to supply more current or it wouldn't be possible to charge such a battery in such a short time, even if the resistance was zero.

85kWh supplied in 5 minutes would require an 1020kW power supply, assuming a perfect zero resistance battery and charging cable. For reference Tesla currently use 120kW chargers, 1/10th as much.

Having said that, 1MW isn't unreasonable to supply for charging. It will require some new developments in the design of the battery and charging system, but it's not beyond the realms of practicality.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[AmiMoJo]

Exactly. Inventing a fantastic new battery technology does not make you the next Panasonic. There is a reason why Tesla and other high end manufacturers use Panasonic cells in their batteries and not cheaper Chinese ones: quality. They need reliable cells that degrade predictably and consistently, and don't suffer from a high failure rate. It's more an engineering/manufacturing problem than a scientific one.

This new tech might be wonderful but unless someone like Panasonic picks it up and develops a way to manufacture it to a high standard, at considerable expense, it won't be in electric cars any time soon. Not to mention the fact that Tesla would need to increase the charging current of their current superchargers at least 10 fold to hit a sub 10 minute charging time.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[exploder]

Oops, definitely slipped a few decimals there. Apologies to parent.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[cptdondo]

Or bump the voltage in the cable up. If you charge at 4KV instead of 400V, you keep the current the same. Then you step down the voltage in the charger. It keeps the size of the cable the same.

It can be done. It's done every day, with 120VAC chargers being used to charge 12VDC batteries, just on a much, much bigger scale.

Re: No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

10kV is NOT safe as connector damage could lead to arcing over several metres. Also, stepping 10kV down to battery voltage would require some serious electrical footwork.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[tibit]

How does that work when you've got more then one material?

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Rei]

Nope, can't do that.

High power chargers are DC straight into the pack. You don't get to choose the voltage. If you tried to run high voltage in the cable and a converter in the vehicle, one that'd be a massive converter, and two, cooling it would be a huge problem in its own right.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Rei]

Li-ion loses a negligible percentage of its energy as heat. A li-ion pack charged over the course of an hour or so is usually around 99% efficient. Surge charging can drop it to 94-97%, depending on the chemistry and rate, but again, li-ion is very efficient. Flywheels are much lossier. They're also more expensive, larger, and have more catastrophic failure modes.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Rei]

That's not true, the mAh levels of batteries keep rising as the batteries themselves shrink. And while there have indeed been some improvements in electronics efficiencies, these have been largely offset by increased demands in various roles.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[rjstanford]

Agreed. People forget that sloshing gasoline around is dangerous too - we've just become blasé about it.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[rjstanford]

Oddly enough we've become comfortable with large underground storage tanks that, when not maintained, will start to leak gasoline into the groundwater. Those are coupled with very large trucks delivering fuel often in mostly residential neighborhoods.

Replace the fuel storage with a moderate power buffer (flywheel, battery, whatever), and add a moderate charging line and we'll be fine.

Just because something is different doesn't make it worse - or better.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

It's still a lithium ion battery, they've just changed the material being used for the anode.

They call a lithium ion battery that because of what they use to make the anode.
So no, it's not.

Re: No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you might mean "precedent" kind sir.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[johnlcallaway]

So how is the fueling station going to get enough juice to charge 5-10 cars at the same time??? Their own generating station?? High-voltage electric lines directly from the sub-station?? And how are they going to get that much power out into the middle of some of the large tracts of land that make up the western half of the US??

I hope they can do it. I'm cheering for them to find a way.

I doubt if we will see anything nearing 25% electric-only cars in the next 20-40 years. I see households possible having two cars, one gas and one electric. My wife and I have two, I have a higher-MPG, smaller car because I travel farther that is also our 'travel' car if we drive long distances. She has the heavier utility because she likes to sit up higher and drives less and we need something to go to Home Depot and get stuff or to the dump and get rid of stuff. We have two cars because it's not practical, based on our jobs. to car pool. Even with other people because we work odd, and sometimes unexpected, hours.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[alexo]

85 KW*hr in 5 minutes is about a megawatt of power. Even at 10,000 volts, you're talking 100 amps.

That's not nearly enough. I need three orders of magnitude more than that to power my flux capacitor.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

Battery capacities are typically measured in amp-hours, not watt-hours.

Supply devices (batteries, mostly) are typically measured in amp-hours. Loads (refrigerators, electric cars, etc.) are typically measured in watt-hours. There's not a huge difference between the two, except that watt-hours factor in the voltage. That's useful only when voltage isn't kept constant. Why? Because watts are volt-amps RMS. If you have a fixed voltage, then your watt-hours can be simplified to amp-hours-at-fixed-voltage, and the fixed voltage is already known, so it gets dropped.

Wired-in AC (or "mains" voltage, if you're British) is an example where voltage is kept within an acceptable range. In the US, "120 VAC" service is actually only guaranteed to be somewhere between 108 and 132 VAC (that's +/- 10%). Thus rating things that run as a load on wired electrical service is best shown as a measurement in watt-hours to compensate for voltage fluctuations.

Rating a battery with an unregulated output (like a standard car battery or a D-cell flashlight battery) is an approximation at best. As the battery loses charge, the chemistry of the cell changes and voltage drops. Manufacturers rate these as a certain number of amp-hours (usually in milliamp-hours, or mAh), but that's only valid when the battery is fully charged and fresh. These would also be better off rated as a certain number of watt-hours.

But rating a battery with a voltage-regulated output (like most lithium batteries) is different. The integrated electronic regulator circuit can draw higher current or raise resistance to bring the voltage up when it sags (and it will sag, because the individual cells it's regulating aren't that different from what's going on in your average D-cell). The basic formula here is good-old E=I*R, so raising I (current) or R (resistance), or both, will bring E (voltage) up. This mechanism allows the amp-hour rating to be accurate for this type of battery. Watt-hours aren't needed to compensate for voltage variations.

These batteries also use that same integrated regulator circuit to keep from overheating, catching fire, or exploding during the charge cycle.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[IndustrialComplex]

Maybe he meant a battery in the classical sense of energy storage. By that token a hydroelectric dam could be considered a giant battery with the capability to output 100kW/hr...

(Or I have a bad habit of trying to see the silver lining in thunderheads)

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Khyber]

We're not using AC to charge, so no, surface area does not matter. Just conductor size.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Khyber]

"Logically you do not charge electric vehicles at a "commercial vehicle charging station" but at any regularly used parking point via induction charging."

Induction sucks. You lose tons of power utilizing that as a charging method. Even with coils wrapped directly around the glass of the induction lamp I made with Anko Solara, you still drop 30%-ish of your power straight to the air - that's WITH shielding around the coils to help prevent loss.

Direct connection is ALWAYS superior.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Dishevel]

Thinking before you hit submit is a good idea sometimes.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Khyber]

"There is no such thing as 100kW/hr battery."

Uhhh. Nuclear batteries can get that high and MUCH higher.

Try again when you actually know about batteries.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Shatrat]

It's kW*hour not kW/hour. If a new battery powers my phone for twice as long does that mean it has half the capacity?

Re: No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

just out of interest, do you have any idea how thick a 100A mains supply cable is?

People on here discussing how they can throw 300A 5min bursts, at mains voltage - there seems to be little thought as to who in hell is going to supply this. Not only is this level of amperage incredibly dangerous, it is beyond the infrastructure of, i`d guess, around 95% of current domestic supply. And anyone thinking this problem is going to resolve itself anytime soon, needs their head examined.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

"Lithium-ion batteries usually use additives to bind the electrodes to the anode, which affects the speed in which electrons and ions can transfer in and out of the batteries. However, Prof Chen’s new cross-linked titanium dioxide nanotube-based electrodes eliminates the need for these additives and can pack more energy into the same amount of space."

Re:No mention on capacity though

[torkus]

Let's try apples to apples though - what does an EV filling station need to provide to match a gas station?

Average 2013 new car MPG is 24.9 (use 25)
Tesla MPGe is 89 to 95 (use 90)
1 Gal Gas Equiv = 33.4kWh (wiki)

3000 gallons sold/day * 25MPG = 75000 miles per day
75000 miles / 90MPGe = 833 GGE
833 GGE * 33.4kwh = 27.8MWm over 24 hours is ~1.2MW

The tesla chargers are ~90% efficient and MVA-level grid transformers are mid to high 90% efficient. So even accounting for those losses that your total power grid demand is under 1.5MW for a full service station.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[LeadSongDog]

Flywheels are fine for vehicles that only travel in straight lines, but when they have to turn corners, precession rears its ugly head, creating a torque that tries to barrel-roll the vehicle. That makes them useful for regenerative braking (which spins the flywheel fastest only when travelling slowest), but not for the main energy store (which spins fastest at the first part of a journey, irrespective of the speed of travel).

Re: No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

just out of interest, exactly what equipment do you have which requires 300A?

I would be surprised if you had anythingrequiring 30A.

Re: No mention on capacity though

[itzly]

Design the connector so that in case of damage, arcing happens inside the connector to a safety ground. Several meters is nonsense by the way, it won't go over a few centimeters. And you can detect arcing by comparing outgoing current with incoming current, and seeing if there's anything missing. Also, you measure current going into the safety ground. As soon as you detect something out of the ordinary, cut the power, and don't turn it back on until a service technician has looked at it. Don't forget we don't need absolute safety. We just need to be safer than granny wielding a gasoline ejecting hose. Stepping down would take some effort, but it's not rocket science.

Re: No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

People here are saying it is not possible for commercial setups, like a gas station, which would just be wrong. Your house might not be setup for it, but it is pretty easy to get a commercial setup that can handle it. Projects I've worked on that involved the development of high power equipment had supplies that could give several kiloamps of current, whenever wanted, and cables could handle that for a couple minutes. Ampacity standards tend to deal with cables that might be in a confined space and used continuously, whereas there are options to deal with rather larger currents if it is done for a short period and over a short distance.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[lsatenstein]

85 KW*hr in 5 minutes is about a megawatt of power. Even at 10,000 volts, you're talking 100 amps.

The Koch brothers are rubbing their hands in glee. Bye bye Oil, hello Electricity, hello coal.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[angel'o'sphere]

First of all a bakery is only baking perhaps 3 pr 4 hours a day, unless it is an industrial one.

Secondly, the price per kW for industrial customers in germany is ca. 5 cent plus taxes ... the total is rarely over 10 cent.

I guess in the USA it is much cheaper ... well, or not. Who knows?

Re:No mention on capacity though

[torkus]

Also, based on math in a previous post of mine you'd realistically only need 1-2MW.

That's for a full electric 'gas station' that is able to serve as many customers as a regular gas station does in a typical day. Technically it's to sell the equivalent number of 'driving miles' since EVs are ~3x more efficient. :)

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Nethemas the Great]

This is Slashdot. So... wishful thinking, or did you forget to yourself?

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Blaskowicz]

It's working well for CPUs! one hundred amps in that little square, even more than than for high end GPUs.
You even have the main PSU supplying the power through a much lower number of connectors to the power circuitry surrounding CPU and GPU, at about 10x the voltage.

For a car yes we'd have a combination of high voltage, active cooling of shit and not charging as fast as that.
For stationary use by electric utilities the battery would probably be very useful even with huge power connector.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Nethemas the Great]

How would there be any increase in heat? If they can stuff power into the battery in less time wouldn't that suggest that there's an increase in efficiency, i.e. lower resistance?

Re: No mention on capacity though

[Blaskowicz]

A little idea to determine safe voltage : see what is used in electrical trains.
There is 3000V DC, but often phased out in the past, present or future in favor of 25kV AC.
1500V DC is more common and is used by the French railways, so I guess it is more realistic. And half that is used by trams, which would be even more realistic but that's getting boringly low.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Re:No mention on capacity though

[icebike]

Because when you start talking about that kind of amperage even the resistance of the cables becomes significant.
Look up cable requirements in the electrical code some time.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[david_thornley]

You mean a nuclear battery that can go from 0W to 100kW in an hour? Try again when you actually know about units.

Re: No mention on capacity though

[photonator]

Thank you; at least a few of us still understand power theory. Sure, we can now assume all car chargers will be tapped into an infinite buss. Geeez.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[fluffy99]

In 2012 the US used 360 million gallons per day.
http://www.nacsonline.com/Your...
(360 million gal gas) x (33.4KWh) = about 12,000 GWh = 500 Gigawatts averaged over 24 hours.

Lets assume 25% of the vehicles convert to electric only, and they are 4x as efficient (your 25 mpg versus 100 mpge), thats 31 gigawatts

For comparison, the current US electric power production capacity is around 1100 Gigawatts with current average consumption around 500 Gigawatts. Realistically, you never have more than 80% of capacity online, and that last 10% is expensive gas turbines versus cheap coal.
http://www.eia.gov/electricity...

So after some significant hand waiving, and napkin doodling - I estimate that converting 25% of the cars to electric only will consume somewhere around 10% of the excess generation capacity in the US.

Re: No mention on capacity though

[codegen]

I believe the OP was talking about combined draw of all the equipment in his restaurant.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Khyber]

Yea, we've got them deployed for hospital backups.

Try again when you actually utilize these things in everything from hydroponics buildings to hospitals.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[shutdown -p now]

Convenience often beats efficiency. If I can just park my car and walk away, and know that it's charged enough to compensate those 10 miles that it took me to drive there, I'm happy. And hey, if we also get fusion working anytime soon? I don't think we'll care much about that 30% waste then.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[shutdown -p now]

You're still missing the point. The unit of energy is killowatt-hour (kW*h), not kilowatt per hour (kW/h).

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Khyber]

You're still missing the point - in many classes now days, kW and kWh are taught to be the same thing and understood automatically. Much like the (you) understood bit of English.

Aka, it's automatically understood to mean that any time power is talked about, time is automatically a fator, with the unit of time being the hour.

Catch up with the rest of the world, now!

Re:No mention on capacity though

[david_thornley]

I really don't care what perversions of units you claim to be English. This is Slashdot, and you're among pedants. One kilowatt per hour has a genuine unambiguous meaning, although it's almost never a useful one. You can, I suppose, argue that colloquially a kilowatt means the same thing as a kilowatt-hour, and that you can tell them apart in context, but kilowatt/hour instead of kilowatt-hour is just stupid.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[shutdown -p now]

I don't know what they teach in US classes. The one that was taught to me talked about SI units, and specifically explained things such as derived units, and how to properly keep track of units when doing calculations, and use that to catch mistakes when e.g. things that are not supposed to be added or multiplied together would be combined by mistake. Using a wrong unit like that in your homework (be it kW/h or just plain kW to refer to energy) would earn an immediate fail grade.

Re: No mention on capacity though

[randallman]

You could use battery packs as buffers. 1 MWH of battery buffer should do nicely.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[thegarbz]

And conductor size is given in .... oh will you look at that, surface area of cable cross-section. Who'd have thought.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm

So; they have batteries that can charge and discharge in 5 minutes.

You want to charge 5 cars right?

By your maths; that means they need 10MW grid connection.

If it takes 5 minutes to charge; and 5 minutes to switch cars, or 10 minutes total time per car...
If they had a battery bank with the capacity of 5 electric cars, they could have a 5MW grid connection, and be at full charge by the time the next car plugs in.

And that is assuming there's a line of cars going out from the station forever, and they only have a battery bank big enough to charge 5 cars.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[rtb61]

Likely that person is confusing efficiency with loss. Induction is less efficient but the energy loss is through the conductive performance of the cables and heat generated rather than efficiency losses through induction. Safety issues, vandalism and of course stupid mistakes all will drive induction as the quickest, safest, easiest method of charging, where that charging is secondary to other services or goods provided at that location. As for airgap, if the induction points are in the front and rear bumper and you provide an impact absorbing buffer at the supply point, gap is minimised.

Re:No mention on capacity though

[cwsumner]

Moving all of the energy that a 85 kW-hr lithium-ion EV battery can hold into a battery in 2 or 5 minutes would require some truly dangerous amperage,
and some enormous amount of heat could be generated.

Go parallel. ...

Actually, it's the other way around. Charging of large packs is done in series, at a higher voltage, so that a large amount of power can be transferred at lower amperage. That's why long distance power lines use ultra-high voltages but relativly small wires.

The question is how do you avoid over-charging some of the cells, if they are not exactly matched. (Smart computerized power packs)
And, how high can a car charger voltage go, before it gets too dangerous. ( About 220 volts, maybe )

Re:No mention on capacity though

[cwsumner]

Wasn't he talking about the flywheel being in the filling station ??

Re:No mention on capacity though

[cwsumner]

Typical for industry. Most petrol stations I know of are not zoned in any kind of industrial area.

This will be ok to do in some area, but don't pretend that we can simply go and plug these into every petrol station.

Keep in mind that a lot of the people talking about this, here and other places, live in cities and don't believe that anything outside of the cities really exists...

But the remote locations will probably just stay the same (gasoline) until they can get a fusion power unit in a shipping container out back. 8-)

Re:No mention on capacity though

[Khyber]

"just plain kW to refer to energy"

Yea, that better be a fail grade because the SI unit of energy is the joule.

That's why kW is understood to include hour. Because using kW to refer to energy is stupid as the SI unit is the joule.

the nation that controls capacity

[turkeydance]

controls, well, capacity.

Charging amperage

[FunkyRider]

Charge car battery up to 70% in 2 minutes? Dare you calculate the amperage needed? Somewhere in the ballpark of 10000A in 12V? That would do it, melting all wires in the connection.

Re:Charging amperage

[almitydave]

Well, it says they've developed "a battery" that can be charged that much that fast. It doesn't say what the capacity of this battery is. I'd guess it's a small research/proof-of-concept battery of cell-phone size or smaller. Later in the article, they talk about charging an electric car in <15 minutes. The Tesla superchargers provide 200kW, enough to charge the Tesla Model S with the 85kWh battery fully in 1 hour, and you can get home chargers that charge at 200V 100A. Surely 4 times the amperage wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility?

Re:Charging amperage

[haruchai]

Does the Tesla's main battery charge at 12V?
But it would take a heck of a lot of power to charge in 2 minutes, on the order of a couple MW which isn't the kind of cable you want on every street corner.

Re:Charging amperage

[Anonymous Coward]

The Tesla car battery is 375 Volt.
85kWh to 70% in 2 minutes would require around 5000 amps. Lets say that a more realistic charge current is 1000 Amps. 10 minutes at the station, that's doable but the connector is going to be some kind of beast.

Perhaps a more realistic solution are standardized battery packs that gets swapped.

Re:Charging amperage

[sribe]

Surely 4 times the amperage wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility?

Not beyond the realm of possibility, no. But requiring not just new wiring into your house, but probably new wiring of an entirely new kind, at higher voltage, with specificallly-designed safety measures in terms of conduit, how it's routed, protection against touching contacts, and so on.

Re:Charging amperage

[Carnivore]

The current HV battery is around 400V.

Re:Charging amperage

[Half-pint HAL]

Commercial charging stations.

Re: Charging amperage

[Anonymous Coward]

This sort of thing would probably only be used in Tesla charging stations, not at the owner's home.

Which is fine, you usually have a lot more time to charge the car while it's sitting in your garage.

Re:Charging amperage

[ihtoit]

20KW would *melt* domestic feeds even before you get to the meter. Over here the average home has a 60-100A meter fuse (with 60A becoming more and more common, I had to pretty much demand a 100A and a leg main out to my garage) at 220V, that's 13KW or so at the meter - before you get to the distribution bus. Your ring main is rated at 3.6KW max total load *for the entire circuit*.

Re:Charging amperage

[Anonymous Coward]

20KW generators powered by diesel engines are pretty common...oh wait.

Re:Charging amperage

[sribe]

Commercial charging stations.

Certainly. Located near already-existing high-kW/mW power sources, as in near malls or office parks...

Re:Charging amperage

[swillden]

Surely 4 times the amperage wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility?

Not beyond the realm of possibility, no. But requiring not just new wiring into your house, but probably new wiring of an entirely new kind, at higher voltage, with specificallly-designed safety measures in terms of conduit, how it's routed, protection against touching contacts, and so on.

You wouldn't need or want this sort of rapid charging capability at home. Slow charging works just fine at home, it's when you're traveling long distances or running around town for many hours that you need fast charging.

Re:Charging amperage

[MightyYar]

I have a feeling I'd be jealous of your climate. We have 150A 220V service and the panel is completely full (electric ovens and two AC units...).

Re:Charging amperage

[almitydave]

20KW would *melt* domestic feeds even before you get to the meter. Over here the average home has a 60-100A meter fuse (with 60A becoming more and more common, I had to pretty much demand a 100A and a leg main out to my garage) at 220V, that's 13KW or so at the meter - before you get to the distribution bus. Your ring main is rated at 3.6KW max total load *for the entire circuit*.

Well, I have zero first-hand knowledge - I'm just repeating what I read elsewhere. You can get a 100A home charger that provides 20kW if your house is wired for it. Source: Wikipedia

Besides, the context of this article is commercial charging stations for on-the-go charging. The superchargers already deployed provide 90kW, but are capable of 400V 250A. So we're already talking about serious current in place. Source: Motortrend

Re:Charging amperage

[roc97007]

20KW generators powered by diesel engines are pretty common...oh wait.

That's a succinct example of the difference between "zero emissions" and "zero point emissions".

Re:Charging amperage

[mcswell]

My uncle had one of those, late 1950s as I recall. He was a farmer, and the pump was labeled for non-street use (i.e. for his tractors), since there was no gas tax on it. Not that this prevented him from filling up his car from it...

Re: Charging amperage

[Anonymous Coward]

Um you have no idea what you're talking about. The batteries used in hybrids and pure electrics don't operate at 12V. Usually they are In Parallel configurations operating at 10 -20 x that, lowering your current needs by the same amount. 500A is doable all day long. My house had s 200A feed for comparison purposes.

Yep. Totally doable.

Re:Charging amperage

[radtea]

It doesn't say what the capacity of this battery is.

It also doesn't say what the energy density is, and there is a comment that something called the "power density" needs improvement.

Searching around a bit, it looks like this is a bit of incremental improvement on Lithium Titanate to facilitate faster charging. The theoretical energy density is 175 mAhr/g at 1.5V or about 1 MJ/kg (petrol is ~40 MG/kg): http://www.the-cryosphere.net/...

This is at the top end of current Li-Ion batteries, so faster charging makes sense. I see also that there are "power densities" in W/kg reported for some battery types, so I guess that's a term of art in the battery business (it has been my experience that applied physicists routinely blind themselves to what they are doing by adopting such terminology, as it typically pertains quite restrictively to the state-of-the-art at the time the terminology was thunk up.)

Re:Charging amperage

[roc97007]

The Tesla car battery is 375 Volt.
85kWh to 70% in 2 minutes would require around 5000 amps. Lets say that a more realistic charge current is 1000 Amps. 10 minutes at the station, that's doable but the connector is going to be some kind of beast.

Was wondering about that. Surely the power pack is made up of a group of individual cells. It seems like you could attach a cable to each cell and charge them all simultaneously without having to use a single cable as big as your leg.

It'd be inconvenient to attach and deattach, but perhaps industrial robots could be employed. That might be interesting to watch.

Re: Charging amperage

[Anonymous Coward]

Over here (Florida) typical new houses have 200A feeds. 250-300A 3 phase is possible too on larger houses/McMansions.

Re:Charging amperage

[radtea]

Petrol is ~40 MJ/kg, obviously, not whatever "MG/kg" might mean.

Re:Charging amperage

[colin_faber]

I see what you did there =)

Re:Charging amperage

[Charliemopps]

Ok, lets do some math...

70% of 85kwh = 59.5kwh
5min is a 12th of an hour.
So to charge a 59.5kwh battery in 5 min, you would need 12 * 59.5
So a 714KW charger
At 12v that would be 59500 amps. Which is insane.
I can't find any sort of documentation on that kind of cabling that would require.
But I can find documentation of 120vdc using about a 3inch diameter cable.
Which gives us an area for the cable of about 7 inches.
Given a Cable 6ft long to charge it, it would have a volume of 508in3
1in3 of copper weights .31 pounds
So your cable would weigh 157lbs.

Keep in mind, this is the total volume of the copper cable. You'd likely make it braided so it were flexible and it'd end up being larger than 3in in diameter at the end. You'd need to have a crane to charge your car.
I'm not saying that isn't possible, but given the amount of work involved wouldn't be a lot easier to swap out batteries like you do propane tanks on your gas grill? I mean, if there's already a crane involved. Then you don't need to amperage's so high you could weld asteroids together.

Re:Charging amperage

[Anonymous Coward]

Hm... I have a 44KW domestic feed coming into my 1950's era house. 200 amps @ 220v, just enough to power my basement computer lab.

Re:Charging amperage

[mspohr]

Not sure where you are but in the US, most homes have 200 amp 240 volt service = 48 KW.
My electric dryer alone draws 8 KW, same for electric range or spa.
Your electric service is just inadequate.

Re:Charging amperage

[sharknado]

Commercial charging stations.

I was thinking that it wouldn't be in the best interest of gas stations to provide a charging service because it would undermine their current business model, which is to distribute gasoline.

But then it occurred to me that if they make the same margins on the electricity as they do on the gas, then it's actually better because they wouldn't need to maintain a huge distribution network for gasoline.

Finally, I realized that switching to electric charging stations would enable small companies without a massive oil distribution network (or even the local electric utility) to compete, and make their margins a lot smaller.

So...I'm sticking to my original idea that gas companies will do everything they can to stop electric cars from reaching critical mass. Because at that point, they're essentially obsolete.

Re:Charging amperage

[Kiwikwi]

Enh, seems to be only off by a factor 10, though IANAEE (I am not an electrical engineer). Forgive me if I'm missing a factor 1.44 or something, below.

Obviously you don't charge an electric car battery at 12 V. What the individual cells do is irrelevant, since they charge in parallel; the bottle neck is the cable attached to the car (and cooling, but hey, we're assuming magic new wonder battery tech, so I'll conveniently ignore that issue).

The highest power available using standard CEE (IEC 60309) plugs and mainline voltage is 3 x 125A x 230V, or about 86 kW. This is not normal in a home, obviously, but you can easily get a couple of these in commercial installations.

Ignoring losses (I know, I know), 86 kW means one hour to fully charge a Tesla Model S with the big 85 kWh battery pack, but that's also a big battery pack.

Charging the 48 kWh battery of the upcoming Model E to 70 % will take: 70% x 48 kWh / 86 kW = 23 minutes.

Now, I would've thought 3 x 125 A x 230V was about the limit, simple due to the weight (those cables are very heavy!). But apparently, Tesla Superchargers go beyond this, to more than 120 kW (340 A x 360 V), with possible plans for 135 kW or even 150 kW. (I guess if the cable is short enough, and you increase voltage beyond mains voltage...) This gives you 70% x 48 kWh charging times in as little as 17 minutes (120 kW) or even 13 minutes (150 kW). Still a far cry from 2 minutes, but then the 17 minute figure is using current mass-market technology.

Re:Charging amperage

[Kjella]

Sure, but why? If you start out on a long haul drive it's been charged overnight, if you end a long haul drive it'll charge the coming night. The only reason you'd need a really quick charge at home is if you're just doing a pit stop between one long drive and the next. In that particular case I'd just plan on using superchargers as if my own home was just a diner, it's so rare it'd never pay off.

Re:Charging amperage

[Anonymous Coward]

He's in the UK. The term "ring main" is a dead giveaway: only the UK uses that wiring layout. The entire rest of the world uses radial circuits.

Re:Charging amperage

[Wing_Zero]

A little bit of digging shows the chevy volt uses a 350v setup.

http://gm-volt.com/forum/archi...

GM officially lists the cell voltage as 3.7V nominal, making nominal pack voltage 355.2V

so Yeah, 70% in 2 minutes might be a bit more reasonable then.

Re:Charging amperage

[able1234au]

Just like video rental stores successfully did the same thing.

Re:Charging amperage

[able1234au]

Battery swaps eliminates the cost from replacing your batteries every 10 (?) years. But then again, i guess the cost would be amortized into every swap you do.

Re:Charging amperage

[Roger W Moore]

I had to pretty much demand a 100A and a leg main out to my garage) at 220V, that's 13KW or so at the meter...

Mean electrical power is voltage times current when using the RMS values for AC: 100A*220V = 22kW...sounds to me like you have enough power for 20kW.

Re:Charging amperage

[ihtoit]

not over a 30A ring, I don't.

Re:Charging amperage

[Anonymous Coward]

You're wrong. I promise you that. You probably have 1, maybe 2 lines at 3 phase 240 volts. The VAST majority of your breakers are going to be single phase 120 volt. If you don't believe me, look at your sockets. How many of them have 3 hots and no ground? The ones your washer, dryer and AC are hooked up to and that's it? Congrats, there's your 240 3 phase. Anything using a standard US style socket is single phase 120V. You probably have closer to 35KW service to your house, maybe a bit less. That's what mine has up here in CO.

Now, Europe does use 240 as the standard voltage to residential (except for bathrooms and possibly kitchen, which run 120V), but you said US.

Also, fun fact, Europe runs at 50 Hz, and US runs at 60 Hz.

Re:Charging amperage

[damn_registrars]

I'm not saying that isn't possible, but given the amount of work involved wouldn't be a lot easier to swap out batteries like you do propane tanks on your gas grill?

I expect that formula e racing will eventually come up with a solution for that. Right now for a race they swap out cars but in order to make it more comparable to formula 1 racing they will want to go towards swapping out batteries instead. Once they figure out a fast and safe way to swap out battery packs we will see the technology quickly trickle down to Tesla and other electric cars. Then it will be a lot like swapping out a propane tank, you'll likely go in and pay for a charged replacement pack that will be quickly swapped at a local station.

Re:Charging amperage

[tibit]

We're talking electric car batteries with bus voltages of hundreds of Volts, and capacities expressed in tens of kWh. That's quite different than a typical 12V car battery.

Even for a regular 12V car battery, your figures are off by an order of magnitude. A 60Ah battery can be charged with 30x the current in two minutes, so 1800A at 12V. A battery designed for such charging is completely practical, but it'd be slightly larger and have slightly lower energy density. It'd use smaller cells and the cells would be connected in parallel banks for normal use, and in series for charging (with electronic switches, of course, allowing cell balancing). You'd be charging such a battery probably at 120V at 180A. I'd be pretty hot, close to boiling after you were done, but hey, want fast charging? Have fast charging :)

Re: Charging amperage

[Anonymous Coward]

you are aware that 500A is in the range of car battery amperage. Yeah, you can arc weld with that. You get the connector on there, but then you need to cut it off because it's fused itself with your car. Yup, totally doable.

Re:Charging amperage

[tibit]

Gas stations make pitiful margins on the gasoline. Single cents per gallon, in the U.S.

Re:Charging amperage

[Damarkus13]

It's important to remember that electrical systems and codes vary wildly from country to country. Where i live (northwestern US) I don't believe you can even get a service smaller than 200A and it's simple to upgrade to a 400A service. I've even seen a few houses with 600A services (I'm a residential carpenter). Also, code here requires radial circuits.

So, around here, it isn't too much trouble to supply 130kw off a residential service.

Re:Charging amperage

[tibit]

Oooh, the British and their ring circuits. 21st century called. Hullo, anyone there? :) Alas, 20kW is completely fine, it wouldn't melt anything. 100A at 240V (not 220V) is 24kW at PF=1.0, and those chargers will be a resistive load, as far as the network is concerned. A practical domestic charger will do current balancing and will consume as much current as is "left over" on the supply side capacity. It'll basically regulate the meter current to the rated supply current.

Re:Charging amperage

[Altrag]

Keep in mind that there are safety issues involved as well when you're talking about amps on that scale, so even disregarding the weight, this would probably not be a wall-socket style plugin.

Imagine an overhead wire system like you see with many rapid transit and electric bus systems. Or perhaps underneath the car for aesthetic reasons. It would need some sort of initiator that's very difficult to operate manually which would expose (or at least activate) the electrodes. Obviously it would need to be operable by technicians for repair purposes and such, but presumably they'd be trained to not fuck around with high voltage equipment.

So basically you drive in, pay your $$$ and then sit back and wait -- no cables or hoses or whatever. I guess it would need to be a 3 stage system for commercial viability:
1) Car activates initiator.
2) Initiator activates payment terminal.
3) Successful payment activates electrodes.

I don't know how well that would work out in practice of course.. just trying to illustrate that our current method of a cable with a plug on the end that the driver manually has to attach to her vehicle isn't necessarily the only option.

Re:Charging amperage

[tibit]

And of course his voltage is 240V, not 220V.

Re:Charging amperage

[tibit]

U.S. homes don't normally get 3 phase service. It also doesn't matter what the breakers for single-phase 120V circuits are, since this charger will be on a dedicated breaker, with a dedicated disconnect, and will run off 240V, not 120V. My home is an oddity as we get two-phase service: the line-to-neutral is 120V, but line-to-line is 208V, and the phases are 120deg apart, not 180deg apart as is with typical residential split-phase service.

Re:Charging amperage

[Anonymous Coward]

Where you did come up with 12v ? Electric car batteries are typically in the range of 350-400v

Re:Charging amperage

[tibit]

Nobody in their right mind would attach such a charger to existing circuits. Everywhere civilized you'll require a new pull of a dedicated circuit, with a dedicated breaker on the panel and a dedicated disconnect for it.

Re:Charging amperage

[tibit]

Who the heck would want to charge a standard 6 cell 12V automotive battery like that? Nobody. Because such a battery is only useful for starting an ICE engine and as a load buffer, not much else. That's why.

Re:Charging amperage

[Damarkus13]

Where are you coming up with 12v? What lithium battery charges at 12v? The individual cells charge at ~4v, and most high capacity batteries are made up of many cells, and each cell has to be charged individually.

Re:Charging amperage

[Charliemopps]

Solution? I could design a mechanism for swapping out the batteries on a pad of paper with a pencil in about 30seconds. Ever seen a forklift? I'm not sure why it's not already a "thing"

Not only that, but it would be a huge marketing opportunity. The owners of the cars would pay monthly for the life of the car to get battery swaps. They could keep track of where you drove, how often you swapped batteries, upsell you on repairs, air fresheners, it would be a marketing persons dream. The owner of the car would never have to worry about replacing a battery and the battery company could avoid some random dude driving in with a poorly maintained battery that would take out the entire block when they hit it with a gigawatt of electricity because they get to be sure it's up to snuff. It would solve pretty much every problem there is with electric vehicles. Roadside assistance could even show up and swap batteries with you if your car died somewhere.

Re:Charging amperage

[Sabriel]

If they can get it down to a quarter-hour I'd be happy. Enough time to take that healthy walk after hours of driving, grab a bite to eat, etc. And if I wasn't doing cross-country, it probably means I've either repeatedly forgotten to charge the car at home or I've got bigger problems.

Re:Charging amperage

[damn_registrars]

Ever seen a forklift? I'm not sure why it's not already a "thing"

Because a forklift isn't particularly quick, and it isn't particularly elegant either. The electric car companies want everything about their cars to come across as futuristic, and there is nothing futuristic about a forklift. Equally as much, how would you get a forklift to remove a large battery pack in a sufficiently precise manner as to be able to make it safely disconnect the old pack and reconnect the new one?

Not only that, but it would be a huge marketing opportunity. The owners of the cars would pay monthly for the life of the car to get battery swaps.

I expect we will see that soon. They just need to figure out a way to make it fast and as fool proof as possible. I expect Tesla and others have had engineers working on this for some time, to reach a point where a car will pull into a service station and the battery pack will be automatically extracted and replaced in the same amount of time it takes to fill a 20 gallon gas tank.

Roadside assistance could even show up and swap batteries with you if your car died somewhere.

That I expect would be a different problem due to the weight of the battery pack. AAA sometimes can't even change a tire for a motorist because of how heavy some wheel and tire combinations are; doing a battery pack is likely out of the question. I expect they'll either do some sort of rapid mobile partial-charging solution or a serial "auxiliary battery" connection for this once there are enough electric cars on the road to make them economically sensible.

Re:Charging amperage

[bill_mcgonigle]

Where you did come up with 12v ? Electric car batteries are typically in the range of 350-400v

But how am I supposed to support the predetermined infeasibility of electric cars without a 150lb cable at 12V?

Re:Charging amperage

[AvitarX]

The difficulty is making it flexible enough for a diverse set of designs.

Re:Charging amperage

[Rei]

20KW would *melt* domestic feeds even before you get to the meter.

I don't know about you, but my new house is going to have a 100A feed. It's not that unusual. 100A * 240V = 24kW.

Secondly, ulltra-fast home charging rates are irrelevant. Seriously, in what scenario is that necessary? Home charging is for overnight. Fast chargers are only needed on highways.

Re:Charging amperage

[TigerNut]

Most electric cars run at least one series string of cells so that each cell will see the same charging (and discharging) current. There are 'battery monitor systems' that monitor the terminal voltage of each cell so that you can detect if one cell is reaching its capacity limit in either direction... that's when you're done charging or driving. The trick with series strings is to know that the cells are at least nominally identical in capacity and internal impedance; then, to set them each to the same state (either zero state of charge or fully charged; and then to connect them all, and drive or charge until you hit the other limit on state of charge. If you work within the limits, you will be able to do series charging and discharge with no damage, and you'll get a long life out of the cells.

Re:Charging amperage

[Damarkus13]

I knew as soon I pressed submit I would be getting this in reply. You're right I extremely over-simplified (probably to the point of being incorrect) series charging with a balancing circuit.

However, charging an 85kWh battery at 12v is still silly. The Tesla pack (which I'm assuming was being referred too) is most assuredly not charged off a single 12v feed.

Re:Charging amperage

[TigerNut]

Absolutely correct. Most electric cars (if you're keen, check out www.diyelectriccar.com) run at least 72V in a series string of at least 20 lithium-ion cells, and some run over 250V. Charging is done using a state-of-the-art high frequency AC/DC switching power supply with power factor correction, so that charging efficiency is maximized. For any given power transfer, double the voltage means half the amps, and that cuts the resistive power losses to 1/4, so it's always worthwhile to maximize the operating voltage within the bounds of the electronics (and safety considerations).

Re:Charging amperage

[Anonymous Coward]

The photo accompanying the article includes what is presumably a set of prototype batteries; they're watch battery-sized. The article does state they're applying for a grant to make a larger proof-of-concept battery, but haven't yet. Soooo, yeah.

Re:Charging amperage

[Anonymous Coward]

you're an idiot. i have 400A 440v 3 phase service. do the math

Re:Charging amperage

[ChrisMaple]

The connector need not be ridiculously large if the system is properly designed. Power is turned off until conductors are clamped together hard. High amperage live connections would cause sparks, wear out the contacts quickly, and spot-welding would be a risk.

Re: Charging amperage

[Anonymous Coward]

Since a petrol engine throws away most of that, it's not really an apples-to-apples comparison.

Re:Charging amperage

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends what part of the US you're in. Here in the northwest, power is cheap (and environmentally friendly, mostly from hydro). So yeah, my parents' house has a 50A 240 to the stove, a 50A 240 to the dryer and two 50A 120s to each of the electric water heater's elements. Their only gas fired heat source is the central HVAC.

Houses here are routinely not plumbed for nat gas because they're all electric. Go somewhere that electric retails for $.30/kw-hr instead of $.10 and all the above will all burn gas and the home might have a single-phase sub-100A feed.

Re:Charging amperage

[N Monkey]

Charge car battery up to 70% in 2 minutes? Dare you calculate the amperage needed? Somewhere in the ballpark of 10000A in 12V? That would do it, melting all wires in the connection.

You're thinking of standard lead-acid car batteries for ICEs.

Charging stations operate at "slightly" higher voltages: See Charge point basics for details on European ones.

EG, of the faster AC ones, ~40kW, for example, use 3-phase power at around (_IIRC_) 450V.

Re:Charging amperage

[Anonymous Coward]

Most electric car battery packs run on ALOT more than 12V. Using 400VDC would be closer to reality, 714kW/400VDC = 1785A. Thats still crazy high but alot more doable. Chassis wiring guidelines for 0000 wire (which are probably a little bit conservative) state that 0000 can carry 380A. so five 0000 wires in parallel should get it done. Each one of those wires are about half an inch in diameter so still a pretty chunky wire. Not something I would expect a teenage girl to heft up to her car to top it off. Perhaps solid copper bars with an insulator around them would work better. I've seen a 1/2" x 4" copper bar carry 2000A w/ ~2000VDC before

Re:Charging amperage

[Roger W Moore]

No not over a 30A ring but the point you made was that it would melt the domestic feed of 100A which is not correct. However, assuming it was properly connected to the 100A input, it does not leave much spare capacity for anything else. So no cooking, heating or even putting on the kettle.

Re:Charging amperage

[WuphonsReach]

Even if it never scales up past cell-phone battery size, the increased recharge ability (10,000 cycles) would make it far better then today's batteries which start to fade after ~200 to ~1000 cycles.

Which was one of the more annoying features of early Lithium Ion batteries...

Re:Charging amperage

[Half-pint HAL]

Finally, I realized that switching to electric charging stations would enable small companies without a massive oil distribution network (or even the local electric utility) to compete, and make their margins a lot smaller.

But there's a heck of an up-front cost to setting up a fast charger, and as the most important place for these is on major trunk roads, you're looking at planned infrastructure -- not just any old Tom, Dick or Harry can set up a service station on a UK motorway, for instance -- there has to be a proven requirement for capacity at the site, and then it is franchised out. Smaller petrol station companies almost never get these concessions.

Re:Charging amperage

[karnal]

Sounds like you have 2 legs of a three phase service wired into your house.

Re:Charging amperage

[Cro Magnon]

My mom's neighbor often does a lot of driving, stops home for a few minutes, and is off again. She might need fast charging even at home. From what my mom says, I'm not even sure the neighbor sleeps before driving off again!

Re:Charging amperage

[swillden]

Drives hundreds of miles, stops home for a few minutes and drives hundreds of miles more?

Re:Charging amperage

[swillden]

15 minutes for what range? I think you're implicitly assuming the ICEV fueling model; drive it until it's almost empty then refuel fast, expecting to get several hundred miles more before fueling again. The dynamics of fueling EVs and ICEVs are vastly different. With EVs what matters is not how long it takes you to recharge, but what rate you can recharge.

For example on the slow charger I have at home, my LEAF charges at a rate of about 5 miles per hour. That is, every hour of charging adds about five miles of range. So charging overnight for, say, 10 hours, puts 50 miles into the battery (which is full at about 80 miles). But that doesn't mean that when I go to the garage in the morning my car has 50 miles of range. No, it almost always has a completely full battery, 80 miles of range. EVs rarely get close to empty.

A 6.6 kW level 2 charger adds about 20 miles per hour, while a level 3 charger is about 80 miles per hour (with my car). Tesla's 120 kW superchargers can push 300 miles per hour.

For long-distance trips, where you have to keep up with consumption rather than being able to rely on stored charge built up over hours parked, you need high-speed charging to avoid spending too much of your trip waiting for the charger. What matters there is the ratio of charging to discharging. For example, using the Tesla supercharger, for every hour you drive (say, 70 miles), you need to spend 14 minutes charging. So you drive for three hours and charge for 45 minutes. That's almost good enough, in fact it is just fine if you like your road trips with sit-down meals at the stops. Increase it by a factor of two and it's absolutely good enough for anyone but the most dedicated we're-not-stopping-pee-in-a-cup types.

But for normal, around-town driving the dynamic is completely different. Assuming you have a battery that's large enough to get you through a day's driving (with some spare capacity), all you really need at home is a charger that's fast enough to replenish however much you drove. Say you drive 150 miles in a day. As long as your charger at home can manage 20 miles per hour, you're good.

It gets more interesting with smaller batteries. If your battery isn't big enough to get you through a day's driving, faster charging at home probably isn't going to help you. What you need then is to be able to charge wherever it is that you're going. Unless you're a delivery driver or something, your car will spend most of its time parked one place or another, so the key is to have charging infrastructure available at those places... and it doesn't have to be fast, just fast enough to not fall too far behind your consumption (the battery capacity is the buffer that allows you to fall behind and be okay, with recharging at home, as long as you don't fall too far behind).

The key observation here is that the model is completely and utterly different from how you fuel an ICEV. When I see people asking for 15-minute charge times, its generally because they don't get this.

Re:Charging amperage

[almitydave]

It doesn't say what the capacity of this battery is.

It also doesn't say what the energy density is, and there is a comment that something called the "power density" needs improvement.

I was confused by that comment at first.

Last year, Prof Yazami was awarded the prestigious Draper Prize by The National Academy of Engineering for his ground-breaking work in developing the lithium-ion battery with three other scientists.

“However, there is still room for improvement and one such key area is the power density – how much power can be stored in a certain amount of space – which directly relates to the fast charge ability. Ideally, the charge time for batteries in electric vehicles should be less than 15 minutes, which Prof Chen’s nanostructured anode has proven to do so.”

I believe he was stating that the power density in the lithium-ion batteries he helped to invent left room for improvement, and this new invention improved upon that.

Re:Charging amperage

[Anonymous Coward]

You've obviously never owned an EV. There have been many times in the last 2 years of my EV ownership when after having run my charge down on running errands in the morning, that a quick trip home to charge up before heading on a trip for the evening would have been great, but a 4+ hour charge time would be a very big hassle.

Re:Charging amperage

[swillden]

I've been driving a Nissan LEAF for three years.

Re: Charging amperage

[Nethemas the Great]

Sure it is. Average ICE efficiency is about 20%. So with that additional bit of calculation done, the effective energy density is about 8MJ/kg.

Re:Charging amperage

[Nethemas the Great]

Where ever did you get the idea that for the purpose of electric vehicles we were dealing with 12 volts? Tesla battery pack has a nominal voltage of 375V, the Nissan Leaf's is 360V.

Re:Charging amperage

[Nethemas the Great]

And thus you have describe electric vehicle "fast" chargers. Multiple conductors going to different regions of the pack.

Regardless, I'm still puzzling why everyone is assuming that Tesla is the bar at which electric vehicle battery capacity is set. Tesla is presently the show off for the affluent crowd. The everyman finds their battery pack installed in a Nissan Leaf or similar. Then we're talking about ~20-25kWh and then numbers start to make a bit more sense. I seriously doubt anyone putting this stuff together thinks they're going to get 60kWh in 2 minutes. Even if you could get 60kWh in 2 minutes, you wouldn't need to.

Re:Charging amperage

[roc97007]

> Tesla is presently the show off for the affluent crowd.

Damned right. Excellent point, and one that's often lost in the noise. If we're not solving for everyman, then this zero point emission thang will only be a rich person's toy. Which kinda blows the whole point of the effort.

But I'd argue that 60kWh battery packs, or even larger, may be important in larger, load carrying vehicles. For instance, when I need to carry objects that wouldn't fit in an econodeathbox, I use an F-series truck. If those are ever going to be electrified, they're going to need bigger packs than a Leaf, and charge time may be an issue. So fast charge of larger power packs may still be something worth exploring, even if you're not planning to tear up the road in an overpriced sports car.

Re:Charging amperage

[Anonymous Coward]

A truck-driving misogynist. Way to defeat those stereotypes!

Light on details, however...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, good, the article DOES mention power density indirectly, saying that this new lithium ion design can store more energy more compactly. However, what about heat generation during thie high-speed charging? Will that be a problem?

Re:Light on details, however...

[haruchai]

That's probably why they stop or slow down at 70% - too much heat buildup.

Re:Light on details, however...

[Narrowband]

Compactly isn't the issue, it's capacity per weight that matters more.

And, not exploding.

Re:Light on details, however...

[NotInHere]

The heat problem is a cooling prolem, nothing more. Traditional motors also produce tons of heat, but they are cooled, and everything is fine.

Re:Light on details, however...

[Ralph Wiggam]

Also on the logistics side, the amount of power required would be extraordinary even if there were no waste heat. The battery in my electric car is 24 kW-h. 70% of that is 16.8 kW-h. Wouldn't delivering that much power in 5 minutes require a 200,000 Watt hook up? Now imagine an electric "filling station" with 5 or 10 bays that could be used concurrently.

The outlet in my garage is 220V 30A (normally used for electric clothes dryers), and I think that's about as heavy duty as you can get in a normal American home. The battery charger is 6600W, to go along with that outlet.

So even if we had these amazing batteries today, there are still a lot of other problems involved in actually shooting that much energy into them that quickly.

Re:Light on details, however...

[BlueBlade]

There is a big difference in cooling a battery VS cooling an engine though. The heat generated by the battery cells has to spread somehow to the outer edges of the battery for it to be dissipated by a cooling system. In cars, the energy density of the battery is hugely important, so you can't just lace the cell areas with good heat conductors without making the battery less efficient. This means a trade-off between how fast you can charge the battery (heat build-up) and how much power the battery can hold.

Re: Light on details, however...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. You'll see 60A and even 100A 2 phase circuits for AC and heating in houses. But as many have said, you don't need a 5 minute charge at home. A 30 minute or 60 minute boost would do nicely.

Re:Light on details, however...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why the individual *cells* in those batteries are relatively small. The cooling system *can* be 'laced' into the area between cells. You know, kind of like how they put heat-conductive bits on the hot parts of a PC (CPU, graphics chipset, etc.) rather than just cooling everything by way of convection.

Re:Light on details, however...

[Anonymous Coward]

240V 80AMP (100AMP Breaker) for pretty much anyone with an average size house with a 200AMP breaker. If you have an 100amp breaker, then 240V 40AMP (50AMP Breaker) going to be the max.

Re:Light on details, however...

[angel'o'sphere]

A charging station has not a power connection like your home has. Why do you belive this?
Perhaps ask the next best mechanics repair station, or a bakery, what power connection they have ... or a wallmart.

Re:Light on details, however...

[EETech1]

1 - 2 MW is nothing for a commercial property though. The only reason your house is wired for 100 amps is you would rarely use over 30 - 40. If the demand is there to sell power, the power company will find a way to deliver it to you.

I design systems with multiple megawatt connections. The last place I was at had 50 MW of service installed to run 5 machines. It was nothing out of the ordinary.

Getting 250 Amps of 480 3 phase is nothing for a commercial property. That would handily cover your 200KW load.

Re:Light on details, however...

[whyAreAllNicksTaken]

Ah but heat waste will be a serious issue. Our electric cars today charge efficiently because the internal resistance of the battery is much higher than the resistance in the rest of the charging circuit (basically the copper wire between the electric meter and battery, from our point of view) Maximum Power transfer theorem tells us that we will achieve maximum power transfer when the resistance of the load (battery) is equal to the resistance of the rest of the circuit. However, when we reach that point, half the power will be used by the load (battery) and half will be converted to heat as a result of resistance in the rest of the circuit. So when we transfer maximum power, we do so at 50% efficiency. The lower the internal resistance of these batteries may mean we can charge them faster, but we will pay a price in efficiency to do so. I'd also be concerned about safety. Low internal resistance is what makes Lithium-Ion batteries so dangerous. It's why, when shorted, they essentially become electrically powered hand grenades. I could certainly see that being even worse with these, but we'd need details to make those determinations, and I can't click on the link prior to commenting per slashdot TOS.

Re:Light on details, however...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why you charge up a capacitor over a longer period from 110V or 220V and then use the capacitor to turbo-charge the car. It's like charging by proxy.

Re:Light on details, however...

[Cramer]

While that may *currently* be the largest common plug found in a US household, the feed from the grid will most likely be 150A or 200A. In my house, there's a 30A "dryer" plug, but also a 60A hardwired line to the kitchen -- an electric stove and/or oven really eats power. (water heater is gas, and also heats the house, or there'd be more high amp drops.)

Re:Light on details, however...

[RealTime]

Electric ranges (oven and cook-top) are 220V 50A .

Electric ranges are pretty common in U.S. homes, although, just some like clothes dryers and hot water heaters, some ranges use natural gas.

The most common receptacle for this in the U.S. is NEMA 14-50R .

Larger RVs also use this receptacle for "shore power".

Re:Light on details, however...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, 50A is way too much. Most residential panels won't even fit breakers that allow more than 20A per circuit (and a 240V is just a double circuit).

Most electric ranges are 30A.

I had a "freak" inline electric hot water heater that used exactly 37A, instantly with no ramp-up. Hunting down a 40A breaker for an old Federal Pacific panel was a bitch. (Fortunately it was not the Stab-Lok kind, which will burn your house down with it's lemons. It was a different line, rated for multi-dwelling units.)

Available in 5 years

[afaiktoit]

you can charge them with your 50% efficient solar panels

Re: Available in 5 years

[Anonymous Coward]

...that's located on the hood, roof, trunk, and side panels of the car. Winning!

Licensed?

[ArcadeMan]

The technology is currently being licensed by a company for eventual production.

Is it Tesla?

Re:Licensed?

[gaelfx]

Dare to dream!

Re:Licensed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh no, the new factory is already obsolete.

Re:Licensed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Far more likely a Chinese company. Electric vehicles (esp. motorcycles / scooters) are a HUGE market over there.

Re:Licensed?

[penguinoid]

The technology is currently being licensed by a company for eventual production.

Is it Tesla?

Of course not. When someone is bragging/hyping, when they miss an obvious opportunity it suggests said opportunity doesn't exist. It'll be some "who knows" company, not a famous one like Tesla.

Re:Licensed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tesla seems to be the only company around daring to dream and turn something like this into a reality. I can't think of anyone else that would invest the resources to commercialize this. Tesla seems like a good bet unless someone else is secretly building a gigafactory.

Re:Licensed?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would guess that Elon would be on to this like a rat up a drain pipe...

I call bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

You will never charge a car in 5 minutes ever.
The smallest Tesla battery is 60kwh. To charge that in 5 mins would need a 720kw supply. For example 2,400 amps at 300v. Totally impractical.
Similar scaling factors apply to smaller devices - charger will be somewhere between totally impractical and very expensive.
To charge a 5000maH laptop battery in 2 mins would need a 3 kilowatt supply

Re:I call bullshit

[haruchai]

That's why I think battery swap stations will become necessary & popular as EVs become commonplace.
I'm glad Tesla built the capability into the Model S and hope they keep it for the Model 3.

Re:I call bullshit

[almitydave]

The article only claims it could "increase their range dramatically, with just five minutes of charging" which is not the same as fully charging. Later they talk about fully charging in 15 minutes or less, which is only 4x faster than the Tesla superchargers on the 85kWh Model S.

Re:I call bullshit

[X-Ray Artist]

I don't see why not. A 1.21 gigawatt power supply has been around for years.

Re:I call bullshit

[Half-pint HAL]

Anything can be achieved with a big enough array of capacitors. A motorway (en_US:freeway) charging station won't have constant demand, so not only would it be acceptable to charge up supercapacitors between cars, but also desirable -- plugging a charger like that straight into the mains is going to generate a heck of a spike, and it'll put a humungous strain on your transformers. (I know -- they use energon, not Li-ion.)

Re:I call bullshit

[ihtoit]

yeah, you're not talking about rewiring a house for that, you're talking about a direct feed to the turbine.

Re:I call bullshit

[bigtrike]

And the plutonium needed for it is now available in every corner drugstore.

Re:I call bullshit

[mcswell]

But it needs Libyan terrorists to supply the fuel.

Re:I call bullshit

[GigaplexNZ]

"Never" is a bold claim. Are you sure that these hurdles would be insurmountable 500 years from now?

Re:I call bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

In 500 years we'd be lucky to still be able to sustain a 19th century level for everyone. The Roman Empire collapsed, what's so special about the current fossil-fuel structure?

Re:I call bullshit

[Alioth]

You don't need such extremes for a small battery, having a 5Ah battery charge in 20 minutes would be awesome and need a much smaller supply. More importantly is the very high number of charge cycles (and the low internal resistance of the battery that this very fast charging would imply) rather than always needing to charge the battery at a high rate.

As for charging a car, the charging stations would need to probably be automatic and high voltage. But rapid charging will be a rarity, something most people need to do only a couple of times a year. What is more important about this battery technology is the high number of charging cycles the battery can manage, not its charging speed. The longer lifetime of the battery hugely reduces waste and cuts cost, the low internal resistance of the battery reduces power wasted during charging. Even given battery recyclability, it's better to have a battery that can be in service for a couple of decades and not need recycling in all that time, than having to go through half a dozen packs in that time.

Most vehicles spend most of the day parked. My own car spends over 23 hours a day just parked, given that and low current charging stations in parking spots and at home, it could charge at a leisurely rate and for normal daily driving use, that would be fine. If my car were electric with the range of a Telsa Model S, only one time in the last year would I have needed fast charging en-route. This is probably true for the majority of vehicles: so the high powered charging stations would be things you find along long distance routes. In reality, charging to a reasonable level in 15 minutes would be entirely adequate, since on a long distance drive you're probably going to want to stop for at least this long.

Re:I call bullshit

[uninformedLuddite]

NVidia's new GPU requires one too.

Safety of (bulk TiO2 == TiO2 nanotubes)?

[Anonymous Coward]

Titanium dioxide might be abundant, cheap and safe in the soil. But are titanium dioxide nanotubes safe?

Tag #cantbuyityet

[Anonymous Coward]

Tag #cantbuyityet. Devil always in the details. Capacity, expense, patents, etc. Also just because a compound is safe doesn't mean nano-structures of that compound are safe. Good ol' carbon and a bunch of other things can become downright evil (or really nice) based on the mere arrangement of their atoms.

Just moves a choke point

[linuxwrangler]

One need only calculate the size of substation needed to deliver the equivalent energy of, say, a 16-pump Costco gas station to see that the fact that a battery can be charged that fast doesn't mean there is any infrastructure anywhere that could support it. The Tesla has an 85kWh battery. In other words, a 70% charge in 2-minutes requires pumping over 1.7 million watts to the car. Think a 2,000-volt supply shoving nearly 900-amps. Per "pump." But that kind of capacity would allow for better capture of regenerative braking energy.

It could be great for things like cordless drills. At ~40-60 Wh the supply would not require more than a standard 120V/15A outlet.

Re:Just moves a choke point

[timeOday]

Maybe the new 'gas pump' is a big capacitor?

Conducting that much electricity, that fast, does seem almost unfathomable though.

Re:Just moves a choke point

[svirre]

Generally fast chargers will not be in constant use. Hence it is acceptable to build a battery pack in the charging station, which can charge at a more reasonable speed off the grid and be capable of delivering high current at a presumably http://www.siemens.com/innovat...

Keep in mind most EV charging can be done overnight at household outlets, only a few very long journeys will need topping up during the day, so it is reasonable that the number of fast charging outlets will be much less than current gas pumps even when EVs reach near complete market penetration, thus the number of installations will be small enough that costs will not be onerous.

Re:Just moves a choke point

[svirre]

Mangled my own text. Sorry.

Generally fast chargers will not be in constant use. Hence it is acceptable to build a battery pack in the charging station, which can charge at a more reasonable speed off the grid and be capable of delivering high current at a presumably much much less than 100% duty cycle.

This was done here: http://www.siemens.com/innovat...

(Apparantly slashdot chokes on the much much less than sign)

Re:Just moves a choke point

[sconeu]

My math shows 714kW, which is a more reasonable, but not by much .7 * 85kWh/5min * 60min/hr = 714kW

Re:Just moves a choke point

[sconeu]

DOH! Never mind. I was using a 5 minute charge cycle (which is what GP used)

Re:Just moves a choke point

[roc97007]

Simple. Put each of those new 2000 amp charging stations next to one 'a' them new fusion reactors.

Re:Just moves a choke point

[ihtoit]

someone check, this isn't a Rossi "invention" is it??

Re:Just moves a choke point

[mcswell]

A flux capacitor, I think.

Re:Just moves a choke point

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever been to a costco gas station? There's typically 20 cars in line.

Re:Just moves a choke point

[Anonymous Coward]

The charging current will not be continuous. Most of the time there is no car plugged in at the charger. Therefore a capacitor will smooth the power needs out nicely.

Re:Just moves a choke point

[Anonymous Coward]

You would need down time to "trickle charge" those capacitors. At some point though if enough people get these cars there would need to be some serious changes in the power grid. Charge stations would most likely be drawing maximum capacity all the time in order to keep their capacitor banks charged, so times that are usually off-peak (like late at night) would all of a sudden require a huge increase in power output. That's not an easy prospect with our current infrastructure which also relies on down time. I guess the simple solution would be to build separate power plants to power just the charging stations since (if they're using capacitors) their power requirements would be constant all day.

Re:Just moves a choke point

[mrvan]

Aire de Berchem is Luxembourg is (according to Dutch wikipedia) the busiest gas station in the world (mainly because Luxembourg has the cheapest gas in the region and it is on a number of busy roads). It pumps 850.000 liters per day, enough to fill up 17000 cars*. If every car needs 70% of 85KWh, this requirs 85k * .7 * 17k = 1GWh per day. If they can spread perfectly over the day, it means they need a 50MW power plant, which I guess is not too far out there. This will probably require some impressive capacitator / battery setup to get enough peak power though, no clue if something like that is feasible.

(the total amount of energy in 850k liters of gasoline is 42.4 MJ/kg * 0.77 kg/L * 850kL = 27 TJ = 7.5GWh. So it seems that the total efficiency of electric cars is about 8 times higher, assuming equal range, which is probably false. But a factor 5 might be around right...?)

*) the wiki mentions it's 80% diesel, and while diesel cars are pretty common here, I would assume that means that the majority of liters goes to trucks. Now suppose your Tesla truck with 500KWh needs to charge in 5 minutes....

Re:Just moves a choke point

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't mind. I'm not going to buy the first one, but if someone else do and try it for a year or two we will finally get a test of his stuff.

At this point e-cat has wasted so much collective time with pointless arguments that it would have been cheaper to let the government invest in it and try it out.
The we would have ended up in a situation where it either works and everyone is happy or it is proven to be a fraud and Rossi ends up in jail.

Someone needs to call his bluff soon.

Re:Just moves a choke point

[Alioth]

You wouldn't need the big 16 pump Costco gas stations in anywhere near the vast numbers they exist now.

My car spends over 23 hours a day stopped. So do the vast majority of other cars, mine is hardly unique. For 99.9% of driving,.slow charging at home or in an office or mall parking space is entirely adequate. If I owned a Tesla model S, there is exactly one occasion in the last year I would have needed a supercharger station en-route. This would mean an enormous reduction in the number of "gas station like" charge stations required.

The biggest deal though is not the charge rate of this battery but its lifetime. 10,000 charge cycles is much MUCH better than what we have now and will reduce the cost of ownership considerably and may open up new applications that are not automotive, for example - storage of renewable energy when there's too much sun or wind, since the longevity of the battery (and also the charge rate implies a very low internal resistance, in other words, efficiency) starts making this kind of thing practical.

Re:Just moves a choke point

[Alioth]

Stations like this would probably be a thing of the past, though, if most cars were electric. For 99.9% of a car's use, the car sits for 23 hours a day parked somewhere, and during that time it can be slow charging out of a normal electrical outlet at home or in a parking spot somewhere. I don't care if my car needs to be on the charger for 10 hours if most of that time I'm sleeping. Rapid charging would only ever be needed en-route on a long journey which are the minority of journeys.

A far bigger deal for this battery is its longevity, not charge rate.

Re:Just moves a choke point

[rjstanford]

Right now everyone who wants to drive - even those not driving for 4+ hours at a stretch - fuels up at a gas station. With electric, many (certainly not all, but many) people will be able to slow-charge overnight. Having electric fast charge stations be less common will be just fine, and there'll rarely if ever be a need for one in a traditional residential neighborhood.

Re:Just moves a choke point

[LeadSongDog]

Generally fast chargers will not be in constant use.

Bull. When I pull off the motorway/freeway/throughway I'm usually stopping just long enough to buy a fresh coffee and dispose of the last one. If it wasn't for the latter requirement, I'd just use the drive-through. Strangely, there's always a line of other people doing the same things, even late at night. If recharging were a broadly-practiced parallel activity, many of them would be recharging, vice refilling as a serial activity. Most available fast chargers would be in use. After all, who would pay to buy and install extra ones that were not going to be used?
So, I want a wireless recharge in five minutes that will take me another three hours down the road, and I want it to be ubiquitously available. I'd settle for a simple and reliable cable connection, but it's not the first choice unless the efficiency hit for the wireless charger exceeds $1/charge. Nobody wants to be messing with manually mated cables when it's -30C or +35C outside. A robotic or drive-on-drive-off contact connections (as for electric subway cars) are viable alternatives. Payment systems have to be as automatic as a toll transponder.

If so...

[kefalonia]

...the impact of this would be profound in energy distribution since it can potentially decouple real-time supply-demand constraints.

Re:If so...

[Anonymous Coward]

As the saying goes, "Cheap, fast, good: pick any two." So far battery technology has actually been more like "pick any one" but with this innovation, Li-ion batteries are fast and good. But they're still not cheap, not nearly cheap enough for grid-scale supply regulation.

Car charged in 5 - math check

[Anonymous Coward]

Any car that is going to compete with gas will need to hold > 250 kWhr. So, 5 minutes is about 0.08 hours. That says 3000 kW of charging power for 5 minutes (assuming 100% efficient). That is 3 million watts for 5 minutes. That's 7350 amps on a 408 V line. That doesn't seem likely anytime soon.

Re:Car charged in 5 - math check

[Anonymous Coward]

You need the Model S to be able to have a range of ~900 miles per charge (250kWh) for it to compete with a gas car?

Utter horseshit. 85kWh is more than enough absolute power for a competitive EV. Though I'll grant you that the Model S battery is marginal on the energy density side of things (and still too expensive).

You seem to think that an EV battery needs to be able to hold as much energy as a tank of gas. Not true when an electric motor is 3-4 times more efficient.

Haven't we heard this before?

[Dorianny]

If only I had a mod point for every Slashdot story claiming a battery breakthrough!

Re:Haven't we heard this before?

[Anonymous Coward]

you'd have a hell of a lot of mod points, but that fancy coffee you got this morning would still cost $6.00 out of your pocket.

Re:Haven't we heard this before?

[rmdingler]

Right.

No matter how high a duck flies, you can always break a window with a hammer.

Re:Haven't we heard this before?

[fustakrakich]

You and this guy are sitting next to each other, right?

It's about time

[NEDHead]

It has been days since my last battery breakthrough fix. When is the next solar panel announcement?

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot about the latest fusion break through!

Re:It's about time

[jafac]

Right after the cure for diabetes!

Re:It's about time

[EETech1]

Sweet, we just had one of those...

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

soo... thursday?

5 minute charge

[confused one]

Clearly, they're practicing some sort of black magic if they think they can charge a 60 or 85 kWh battery in 5 minutes. Either that or they have a connection directly to the power plant located just around the corner.

Re:5 minute charge

[PeterM from Berkeley]

That's 141 A at 120V (DC). It's about the sum total of the power that could go into my house at any given moment.

Not really a 'direct connection to a power plant' required.

--PM

Re:5 minute charge

[confused one]

I'm sorry, that's only 17 kWh over an hour, 1.4kWh in 5 minutes. To get 60kWh charge in 5 minutes you have to 60,000Whr / 120V * 60min/hour / 5min = 6,000 Amps.

Re:5 minute charge

[PeterM from Berkeley]

Right you are, I miscalculated. Thanks for catching it.
I actually did kWm instead of kWh. (Kilowatt minutes).

Re:5 minute charge

[confused one]

6,000 amps at 120VDC could be generated from a 12,5kV feeder found in a typical commercial setting; so, no, you don't really need a "direct connection to a power plant". I was exaggerating a bit. I would expect the utility to pitch a fit if you said you were going to pull that much power... They might have a choice words about your 3/4 megawatt load that switches in for 5 minutes at a time. Words like, "No"

True, but now the bottleneck becomes the supply

[Anonymous Coward]

Your correct, but as opposed to a steady controlled charge to avoid heat build up you can now draw as much amps as the wires can handle. I was more impressed with the 20 year MTBF

If so...

[rebewt]

...which means mass-production of said battery will never see the light of day...

Flywheels

[Anonymous Coward]

I could see gas stations using flywheels or the like for some of the power needs, which would make delivery slightly more practical under intermittent usage. They could also be used for arbitrage/grid stability.

Cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

More battery tech that will NEVER be available.

But consider COST

[timeOday]

The 10,000 cycles might be a bigger deal than the fast charging, because an increase in longevity is almost equivalent to a proportional cost reduction (which is the real big deal). For example, the amortized cost of battery-backup for solar or wind goes down by nearly 50% if the battery lasts twice as long. If a car battery is going to last for 20 years, the high upfront cost of an electric car would be largely offset by its high residual value - if nothing else you could sell the battery when the car wore out to be used in another car, or for grid backup etc.

Re:But consider COST

[sonicmerlin]

It's not just that. Tesla achieves their current battery longevity by only allowing the battery to operate between 20 and 80% capacity. If this new battery can last 20 times longer, they could achieve the same longevity while operating at the full range of the battery, giving them a 40% capacity boost.

Re:But consider COST

[rahvin112]

Other than the battery and consumables like tires and brakes on an electric car isn't going to wear out like a gasoline car. Over a gas cars life the motor and movable parts wear and reach their life, motor, transmission etc. After 10 years it's not economical in a gasoline car to replace these major items because they cost more than the car is worth.

An electric car doesn't have these things. Even the brakes should last substantially longer than a gasoline car because of the regenerative braking and the electric motor itself, if it's quality built, should have a near infinite lifespan. I fully expect electric cars, if this battery survives to production, will have lives in the 20 year range routinely where most gasoline cars last about 10 on average. People will end up replacing them because the body, paint and interior are shot, not because the mechanical systems are gone. You'll still be replacing tires and windshield wipers but you won't ever do a coolant flush, transmission fluid flush, oil change or change a belt in an electric car. Maintenance will be reduced almost to nothing. It will likely be catastrophic to the entire mechanic profession.

Re:I hoping so bad China

[Half-pint HAL]

Yay! Now we can break free of the oil and gas companies evil grasp by using electricity... that will up the demand for oil and gas powered electricity generation. And what with all the transmission losses and efficiency problems, we'll make life difficult for the oil and gas companies by forcing them to sell us more of their stuff. Seriously, if the oil companies have been suppressing EV technologies, their shareholders should be suing the CEOs for professional incompetence.

the problem with lithium ion technology

[ihtoit]

...is when it comes to fast charging the things. You run the risk of dendritic shorting, which is where lithium dendrites cross the electrolyte and touch the graphite electrode, causing the battery to short. THAT is where the heat comes from, not a dry chemical reaction. That's also where the risk of batteries exploding arises, and why certain laptop batteries have been exploding - thermal safeties have been omitted from aftermarket batteries, these are the ones that have been exploding because laptops in powered-off state are charging the batteries with the full whack of the PSU which causes the shorting. Without the safeties, the power isn't cut, the dendrites continue to grow until BOOM! Rechargeable batteries have an additive in the electrolyte that's supposed to inhibit dendrite growth, but it doesn't stop it, particularly when the battery is being abused. Anecdotally, I have rechargeable batteries that I've had for 20+ years and they still hold usable charge - for the simple reason that I have never and will never use a fast charger on them.

Re:the problem with lithium ion technology

[50000BTU_barbecue]

I have Radio Shack NiCds in the blue case. We're talking 20 years here. My friend has some that are filled with juicy gunk in the plastic sleeve and they still work. I even have some RS alkalines from 20 years ago that still work.

RS had some good batteries back then.

Re:the problem with lithium ion technology

[ihtoit]

basic battery chemistry hasn't really changed, charger tech has. OK, the dendrite problem has always been a problem particularly when it comes to rapid chargers, but that can be mitigated by using pulsed charging rather than straight DC. This is why a laptop charges a 48WH battery pack in an hour instead of 18 hours - the battery might still get hot, that's because dendritic growth is still occurring, but as long as that thermal cutoff is still there, and the charging circuit is smart enough (a potential switch) it isn't a real issue in the short term but it *will* eventually be the (sole) cause of battery death. The hack of simply replacing individual cells in the laptop battery is a worker because dead cells are dendritic graveyards, they're like the internal fuse for the rest of the pack - chances are that a dead laptop battery has just one dead cell. Worth a look if you know what you're doing and a new battery costs two hundred quid (some do!).

Re:I hoping so bad China

[Anonymous Coward]

> by using electricity... that will up the demand for oil and gas powered electricity generation.

Use German wind. It's cheaper than coal.

> Seriously, if the oil companies have been suppressing EV technologies, their shareholders should be suing the CEOs for professional incompetence.

Yeah, right --like M$ and Linux -- their shareholders must be very worried about Linux and the general public.

Whatever.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another supposed battery breakthrough that will never actually happen.

Re:Whatever.

[Anonymous Coward]

Horacio Cartes has already announced, "terafactory". The new battery facility will be built just outside Paraguay, where the worlds largest deposit of titanium dioxide was recently discovered. Elon Musk must be quaking in his boots.

Re:Whatever.

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, just like none of the previous battery improvements ever happened, which is why cellphones are still the size of bricks and tablets don't exist.

0% profit on gas. Snacks, sodas make 200%

[raymorris]

The GROSS markup on gasoline is around 2%. Once the station pays for pumps, signage, credit card transaction feesn taxes, etc they make no money on gas. The markup on fountain soda is close to 200%. Gas station owners don't care whether you come for gas, for electric charge, or any other reason. They just want you there for four minutes, long enough to buy a coffee or soda.

Re:0% profit on gas. Snacks, sodas make 200%

[Overzeetop]

Actually, markup on beverages can exceed 500%. Soda costs about 1.5c-1.7c/oz for consumables in a cup which is typically filled 30-50% by volume with ice. That's about 50c all in for a 32 oz cup that sells for $2, or 30c for a 20 oz cup which sells for $1.80. Still, your point stands.

Re:0% profit on gas. Snacks, sodas make 200%

[Anonymous Coward]

by why would you charge at a station if you could just charge overnight at home. The number of people going to gas/electric stations will be a magnitude order less then the number currently.

Re:0% profit on gas. Snacks, sodas make 200%

[itzly]

by why would you charge at a station if you could just charge overnight at home

For starters, not everybody has a garage or even dedicated parking next to their house. Where I live, people park on the street, and it's completely impractical to string a charging cable across the street and sidewalk.

Re:0% profit on gas. Snacks, sodas make 200%

[Half-pint HAL]

Are those consumables cost to the retailer, or the manufacture cost?

100kW battery makes sense

[Roger W Moore]

There could be such a thing as a 100kW battery: it would be a battery which can provide a power of 100kW. Not all batteries can do this since they have an internal resistance which either prevents this power from being achieved or will cause them to overheat and explode/catch fire even if it is. Indeed, assuming that this battery can carry a decent amount of energy, it is very likely that you could make a 100kW battery from it since it charges so quickly it must have a very low internal resistance.

Ironically there is no such thing as a 100kW/hr battery though...

Re:I hoping so bad China

[Anonymous Coward]

Even ignoring the push for renewable electrical supplies, you're still off. Oil companies make a lot more money selling their product to consumers at retail prices than they do at selling in bulk at wholesale rates to power companies.

You think electricity is expensive now?

[NotQuiteReal]

Just wait until electric cars that require commercial charging stations become popular.

The drop in gasoline tax revenue will logically lead to "car electricity" taxes... coming soon to a charging station near you.

Re:You think electricity is expensive now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which really should be replaced by a ton-mile tax that reflects the actual infrastructure costs of running your vehicle over public highways, keeping in mind that road damage increases exponentially as weight increase. An 18-wheeler does 9,600 times as much damage as a passenger car.

Re:You think electricity is expensive now?

[fustakrakich]

What will probably happen is that you will pay an odometer tax every year when you get a new sticker for your plates. Simple and convenient.

Re:You think electricity is expensive now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wait until electric cars that require commercial charging stations become popular.

The drop in gasoline tax revenue will logically lead to "car electricity" taxes... coming soon to a charging station near you.

Well done! If I had ten hands, I'd give you twenty thumbs up on this one.

Re:You think electricity is expensive now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone has to pay for that road you are driving on. Contrary to popular belief, the roads are not free.

Re:You think electricity is expensive now?

[toddestan]

The drop in gasoline tax revenue will logically lead to "car electricity" taxes... coming soon to a charging station near you.

They won't bother with taxing charging stations. What they want to do is put a GPS tracker in every car so they can track where the car is at all times... errr... I mean tax based upon where the car has been driven. They're been pushing for this already.

Don't sell out to the U.S.

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep your technology and the tremendous market and business potential of this in your home country, that's where the economic benefits of this should go. Don't sell it to the U.S. whatever you do.

Wake me when it's actually here.

[kuzb]

There's a battery breakthrough every other week but they never seem to make it in to anything. There are so many parallels between science reporting on batteries and science reporting on cancer in terms of over-hype and fact misrepresentation it's astonishing.

Re:I hoping so bad China

[Anonymous Coward]

Germen wind is a bunch hot air, case in point:

http://www.audiomicro.com/air-being-released-from-balloon-air-release-balloon-air-being-released-from-free-sound-effects-45053

Re:I hoping so bad China

[Anonymous Coward]

You've made a major mistake in your assumptions: a global increase in demand for electricity will more likely lead to a nuclear resurgence, maybe not initially, but eventually, because it's the one kind of power we have besides coal that can be scaled with abundance. Gas and oil plants would be a quick fix that would rapidly expose the market's fragility and lead to its collapse. Gas and oil companies are very anti-nuclear (i.e.: follow Greenpeace and Sierra club money trails) and very anti-electric car for very good reasons.

CARS

[danielbenn]

Another nail in the coffin for gasoline cars.

Believe It Or Not

[Tokolosh]

I have seen with my own eyes, stations capable of refilling 20 cars simultaneously, each in considerably less than five minutes. This would be equivalent to about 80MW, assuming 2.5 minutes.

Of course, the filling was with gasoline, not electrons.

Re:Believe It Or Not

[Anonymous Coward]

No, not electrons. Energy in the form of electricity.

Re:I hoping so bad China

[Altrag]

Not really. While there's certainly no shortage of fossil fuel power stations, there are also many other technologies (solar, wind, nuclear if we can ever get over the paranoia, etc.)

Purely solar powered cars aren't really viable.. you can't guarantee enough sun at exactly when you need it and if you're going to stick in batteries and make it electric anyway, you may as well just move the solar panels off to a more efficient farm.

Wind of course is entirely irrelevant on a car. Much as it would be awesome to see a fleet of cars with giant sails on their roofs, its not particularly practical in the real world.

Nuclear cars are.. not impossible.. but I don't know how practical it would be to build a nuclear cell both small enough and safe enough to put in a car at the same time.

Things like hydro, geothermal, tidal, etc power generation of course don't work on a car since they require specific terrain features to operate.

So yeah, moving to electric vehicles won't kill the oil and gas industry, but it gives us a lot more than one option as a base fuel source. It will however HURT the oil and gas industry so of course they'll fight it tooth and nail for as long as they can, but its a losing battle (at the very least the whole peak oil and eventual production decline is very real even if it has kind of dropped out of the news in the last couple years with the introduction of fracking and new oil field finds.. but we know with 100% certainty that the world is not generating new oil at anywhere close to the rate we're consuming it so eventually it WILL come to pass no matter how long we manage to put it off.)

200kW * 1 hour == 85kWh?!?

[Brannon]

Math is hard.

Re:200kW * 1 hour == 85kWh?!?

[almitydave]

Math isn't hard. I know because I have a degree in it :)

The 200kW was a typo - it should have been 120. And although my degree is in math, not EE, even I know that the charge rate of Lion cells is non-linear. Take a look at the graph in the "How it Works" section here: http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger. You clearly need more than 85kW to charge an 85kWh battery in 1 hour.

You cannot charge a car battery in 5 minutes

[goombah99]

It would take megawatts of power. Are you going to connect a megawatt cable to your car and expect it to work every time?

Re:You cannot charge a car battery in 5 minutes

[itzly]

Why not, exactly ? We currently have inch-thick rubber hoses, capable of spraying gallons of highly flammable gasoline all over the place, with little or no protection. A good electrical cable and connector system would probably be safer.

Re:You cannot charge a car battery in 5 minutes

[brantondaveperson]

It's not quite true that there's 'little or no protection' - and in any case even if you did spill gasoline you still need a source of ignition before you get a real problem. Electricity is more dangerous from that point of view. I'm pretty sure more people die from regular mains shocks than die in service stations filling their cars - I mean, does that even happen? I've never heard of it.

interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Better put a lockbox on your car plug in. I can see people using other people's power to avoid paying for the charge. Not sure how much it costs in electricity to fully charge a car, but if its done in 5 mins, people would not even know people are stealing electricity from them till they get the power bill.

I want this to be true but...

[EmperorOfCanada]

Whenever I see a battery the size of a postage stamp as the prototype I get very nervous. I have read about a zillion revolutionary batteries where the scientists are holding up a fingernail sized bit and saying that all our battery needs have been met. But then the years go by and I never hear about the battery again. The only variation that I am seeing here is that one of them is holding a bottle of milk, while the other guy has a pretty geometric display of fingernail sized batteries.

Quite simply I want to see these guys replace the battery in a small electric car with a known range, battery, charge time, etc and then drive to exhaustion, recharge in 5 minutes and then drive to exhaustion a handful of times with a battery no bigger than the original. Then I want to see a machine that is doing something boringly energy predictable like boiling a tank of water until the charge runs out, recharging, and boiling the just refilled tank of water. That way they can say, this battery the size of a popcan boiled 18 liters of water (or whatever a good popcan sized battery could boil) every 20 minutes for the last 6 months and is able still boil 17.6 liters of water. (25 minutes per cycle for ~10,000 cycles). But some spec of a battery that is subjected to tests that are not real world enough with graphs of discharge rates and whatnot just don't electrify me. Those are great for a science journal but I want tangibles. Unless there is something screwy such as extreme altitude boiling water from room temperature takes a fairly fixed amount of energy.

Re:I want this to be true but...

[putzin]

I have so missed the near constant weekly stream of new battery articles on /.. Used to get them all of the time. You'd have figured that by 2009 batteries would be powering the world with limitless storage and immediate recharge based on the articles in '07 and '08. Honestly, I just complained about this to a friend of mine at Google that we haven't had a good new battery technology pass through here in a while. Phew, I can rest easy. I refuse to care about these announcements until someone actually makes a car or phone with (currently) unrealistic power storage capabilities.

Re:I want this to be true but...

[EmperorOfCanada]

A great comment I read a while back was to ignore anything on the cover of Popular Mechanics involving propellers.

Copper Conductors

[rmdingler]

Really good post.

Electricity tends to flow only so deep in copper wire. High electrical demand industry, like aluminum smelters, tend to use large hollow copper pipes rather than wire as most of the electricity flows near the wires surface.

This would affect your weight calculations.

Lithium Titanate batteries are not new.

[luckytroll]

The existing variations on this tech are faster to charge because of increased interactive surface area, but they have less energy density.

As trade offs go, this puts more of a strain on the charging infrastructure, as you get batteries that charge faster, but need it more frequently. If this tech can increase the lifespan, it could bring prices down, but I would prefer to get my cake (high energy density) and eat it too (high charge/discharge currents possible).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium%E2%80%93titanate_battery

Other benefits than a fast charge

[mrdogi]

Seems a lot of comments are focusing on how to actually do that 5-minute charge. Hardly anybody seems to have thought about the other aspects, especially the ultra-long life. If the batteries can last 20 years/10,000 charges/what ever, it seems to me this is a really good thing. I'd be just fine with a 1-hour charge, or even an overnight charge. Top off when I can, good to go.

Re:Other benefits than a fast charge

[Alioth]

I've commented precisely on this. The longevity is by far the most important thing if this pans out.

Charging rate is much less important, for the vehicle use everyone's thinking of, slow charging covers 99.9% of vehicle use. Get charging down for those relatively rare long distance trips to 20 minutes and it'll be good enough. Tesla is already pretty close to that.

Also a battery that lasts that long may be a practical storage medium for renewable energy.

Re:Other benefits than a fast charge

[Anonymous Coward]

One doesn't have to top off the battery pack every time the car docks at a charger, so the maximum current draw may not be a consuming factor. At peak times (rush hour, for example) the station could limit cars to a minor charge-up, enough to get people home.

Why are slashdotters such idiots on this issue?

[Brannon]

This entire thread is full of jackasses computing the peak power draw and saying retarded things like "does it come with it's own fusion reactor?".

1. It's not a big deal to supply constant MWs to a relatively small number of charging stations along interstates. Next time you're driving along a highway look up slightly and notice the power wires carrying hundreds of MW's right next to you.

2. You don't have to size the power grid connection to cover peak demand, capacitors and batteries located at the refilling station are good at averaging out the peaks so that you just have to worry about some windowed average demand--and average demand is just not that stressful. Think of it this way, gas stations would also run out of gasoline quickly if they were refilling 8 cars at a time every 5 minutes for the entire day. OMG is the gas station right next to a refinery?!?

3. The vast majority of miles driven are daily commuting miles, which will be covered by low & slow charging at home.

4. Tesla basically does this *already* with their supercharger network. Why is it so hard to grasp this concept?

Re:Why are slashdotters such idiots on this issue?

[radl33t]

They simply cannot fathom that the world is changing around them re: the cost and performance of batteries and PV. Surprisingly for a technical site, slashdot is home to the most dated thinking, facts, and arguments I encounter on these topics.

Re:Why are slashdotters such idiots on this issue?

[Anonymous Coward]

This entire thread is full of jackasses computing the peak power draw and saying retarded things like "does it come with it's own fusion reactor?".

In a stunning coincidence - and I mean that in its normal sense - a news item on /. a few entries later is "Lockheed Martin announces development effort of small-scale fusion reactors." So eventually the answer to the jackasses' question may be Yes.

Science is fucking awesome. :-D

Re:Why are slashdotters such idiots on this issue?

[Anonymous Coward]

> This entire thread is full of jackasses computing the peak power draw and saying retarded things like "does it come with it's own fusion reactor?". ...or flux capacitor...;)

ask Tesla. I bet they know why

[raymorris]

> why would you charge at a station if you could just charge overnight at home.

Tesla is spending gobs of money to put "quick" charge stations everywhere they can. I'm guessing they understand the market better than you or I do, having spent millions researching it. If they think it's so important, they are probably right.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Hoax

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds too good to be true

There is no battery

[Animats]

Prof Chen and his team will be applying for a Proof-of-Concept grant to build a large-scale battery prototype.

In other words, they haven't built a battery yet.

Why are so many "nanotechnology" articles like this? People find some new surface chemistry phenomenon in the lab, and immediately announce it as if it were a product ready to ship. Then it turns out that the phenomenon only works under limited conditions, or is really expensive to make, or doesn't even perform in the intended application. The nanotechnology crowd should STFU until they can demo.

Re:There is no battery

[roc97007]

It does seem like a lot of "breakthroughs" lately have been edge conditions that aren't practical to reproduce.

Titanium dioxide is commonly used as a food additi

[Anonymous Coward]

Titanium dioxide is commonly used as a food additive or in sunscreen lotions to absorb harmful ultraviolet rays.

1. if this takes off, will the price of sunscreen or fake potato chips jump in price.

2. does this block Superman's x-ray vision?

(Memo to self: I gotta stop watching Big Bang Theory reruns...)

Query: technological breakthroughs are announced...all the time. Has anybody done a study seeking to answer why most of them fade away, never to be heard from again? My guess would be: 1. it didn't really work as good as claimed 2. it did as good as claimed, but had some other factor such as price, weight, tendency to blow up, that was a big downside. 3. Bayer bought up TENS electronic pain control devices to keep the tech off the shelves, General Motors and Goodyear bought up subways and city rail systems, etc.

One tech I remember, okay, two that panned out:
1. rare earth magnets, read about them in Science Magazine in the early 1980's
2. the resurgence of vacuum tubes in audio, I read about them in Positive-Feedback Magazine in the early-mid 1990's.

Capacity Shamacity

[Anonymous Coward]

High capacity is a nice thing to have, but I would trade the fast charge time for a lousy stinkin' L-Ion battery that doesn't have as crappy a leak current as the current batteries. The self-discharge time of the 1.5 volt L-I batteries are *supposed to be* 5% in the first 24 hours, then 1-2% per month. My Lithium-Ion batteries discharge a whole lot more than that. Without the added impurities needed by the gel, what is the battery leak current? Capacity is nice, but losing half the power by having the car sitting in the parking lot for a few hours is not good either.

I remember reading about these

[Chirs]

The article I read talked about carbon-fiber flywheels spinning in an evacuated chamber on maglev bearings. I think they were hitting over 100000 RPM.

Bunch of stuff...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Logically you do not charge electric vehicles at a "commercial vehicle charging station" but at any regularly used parking point via induction charging.

Or you can do both. Going to all/most-cars-are-electric with older battery technology requires multiplying the grid capacity by about a factor of six. Fast charge capability improves on that drastically - for several reasons I'll get to below - but it still involves trippling it or so. As long as you're building it out to feed cars, you might as well build it out selectively, to both good "gas station" sites and to likely sites for charging while parked.

With fast-charging batteries you can ALSO put some charging coils under major roadways to charge them as they drive. (You wouldn't have to electrify the WHOLE roadway, just chunks of it. And you can have the utility handshake with the car's electronics to collect for the power - or refuse to supply it if it's unwanted or payment won't be forthcoming.)

Not all parking spaces and roads are worth electrifying, and people also need service when traveling. So IMHO, with fast enough charging to make it practical, there will still be quite a demand for electrified "gas stations" to fast-charge those cars that didn't have enough opportunity to slow-charge.

Fast charging at home, though would be problematic: You'd have to drastically increase your service, and the infrastructure behind it. There are a LOT of homes, and in some cases a lot of distance to run bigger wires and a lot of transformers to upsize. Building out "filling stations" for fast charging, or doing that first, lets the utilities concentrate their investment. Fast charge at an electric "gas" station while waiting for your neighborhood's turn for upgrade (or just avoiding paying for one) makes considerable sense.

Fast charging enables a substantial mileage improvement, too, especially in stop-and-go traffic or on hilly terrain. It HAS to be very efficient (because any substantial losses would fry the battery). With it being both efficient and fast, you can use it for braking, even rapid braking, and scavenge most of the energy that would otherwise be lost as heat. Current vehicles can recapture a little of the braking energy - if you stop slowly. Fast-charge batteries can get MOST of it - and then recycle it for restarting, or just cruising against wind resistance and friction once you're off the mountain. ... mega battery factories are so financially risky at this time, real battery breakthroughs are coming down the line, that will change everything.

Maybe not so much: As TFA points out, THIS one is pretty much a cheap drop-in, and the resulting battery is so good that it makes the quantitative leap in to the practical. Lithium is really light. So this battery might be so close to optimum that it will be hard to make big enough additional breakthroughs to displace it if it takes market share now and does its own incremental improvements later. Meanwhile, the perfect is the enemy of the adequate. This looks good enough that it's time to adopt it. So "the future" might finally be here.

Not just used in cars of course but also to be used in residential properties to really drive renewable energy sources and people in the burbs being able to escape the grid ...

Right on! Raw generation with solar photovoltaic in sunny locations is already cheaper than grid power. Windmills in windy areas have beaten the pants off it for a long time and in moderaty windy areas has done the same since strong rare-earth magnets became available at reasonable prices. The control electronics participates in the Moore's Law effect and its price will drop even faster, due to economies of scale, if deployments become common. The big rub has alwayd been storage.

High efficiency, high capacity, high charge/discharge rate, many cycle, long calendar life batteries, made of inexpensive, common, non-toxic materials, built in high quantity under substantial price

The diode voltage drop would cause power loss.

[Futurepower(R)]

I think there would be too much power loss in the diodes. Quote from Wikipedia about diodes:

"In a small silicon diode at rated currents, the voltage drop is about 0.6 to 0.7 volts. The value is different for other diode types -- Schottky diodes can be rated as low as 0.2 V, Germanium diodes 0.25 to 0.3 V, and red or blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs) can have values of 1.4 V and 4.0 V respectively.[16]

At higher currents the forward voltage drop of the diode increases. A drop of 1 V to 1.5 V is typical at full rated current for power diodes."

At 400 Amps, the power loss with a 1 volt drop is 400 Watts.

Re:The diode voltage drop would cause power loss.

[itzly]

It's about the principle. You don't have to use real diodes. You can use high power switching elements and get the same effect. Look up 'ideal diode', or 'active diode'.

Re:The diode voltage drop would cause power loss.

[Shirley Marquez]

High efficiency power supplies are already doing this. You might have one in your new PC. Instead of using rectifying diodes, they are using power FETs and switching them on and off at the power line frequency because power losses are lower.

Re:The diode voltage drop would cause power loss.

[SalafranceUnderhill]

The voltage drop across an ideal diode isn't resistive, and doesn't cause a power drain. The *resistive* voltage drop across a real-world diode is tiny. Diodes are actually very efficient devices. Don't take my word for this, you have access to this wonderful research tool called 'The Internet'. Alternatively, buy a diode, a resistor for comparison, a power supply, and do the calorimetry.

Re:The diode voltage drop would cause power loss.

[brantondaveperson]

I don't think this is correct. If you measure, with a multimeter, the voltage drop across a diode, then the power being dissipated by the diode is equal to the current multiplied by that voltage. The device isn't resistive, or ohmic, in the sense that the voltage drop is not linearly related to current. But that doesn't mean that the voltage drop somehow doesn't count when you're calculating power.

If

[Anonymous Coward]

there are any real breakthroughs in battery tech that can be applied to electric cars, Big OIL interests will spend whatever it takes to suppress the technology, as they have done before, and are doing now.

Titanium dioxide nanotubes not in soil

[excelsior_gr]

Most applications of titanium dioxide use amorphous nanoparticles, not the crystalline structures found in soil. These take quite a bit of chemistry and energy to produce, like a flame aerosol reactor and precursors like TiCl4. I suppose that the nanotube production is similarly complicated and energy-hungry.

Re:Why are slashdotters such idiots?

[captjc]

This issue?

Slashdot has become just another cog in the internet hate machine. It is gotten to the point that for any story, 70% of the comments now are just bitching and moaning at the topic, even when it is really unwarranted. I am starting to wonder if this place had devolved into trolls and trolls trolling the trolls.

It's About Time

[MyDirtIsRed]

We haven't had one of these "miracle battery" stories on ./ in awhile. I look forward to never seeing this technology in a commercially viable product, just like all of the other previous "breakthroughs" in this field.

alreadyDone, CA high schooler , 2 years ago, ISEF

[Anonymous Coward]

First, they've not actually even built a cell, and they're looking to go for proof of concept.
Second, the idea of using TiO2 (Rutile) nanotube/nanofibers has been around for a while. In general, these schemes work by increasing the surface area (e.g. the tubes/fibers make the thing fuzzy or furry) The high school girl who won the big award at the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) did basically this a few years ago, and had an actual battery to show at the fair, lighting up an LED. The trick is in getting an appropriate coating on the fibers, and in getting the chemistry right (which she did).

http://news.ucsc.edu/2013/06/eesha-khare.html

My 1973 battery pack can run 300+ amps at 36 VDC

[Anonymous Coward]

People whining about current don't know much about it.

The six 6-volt flooded lead-acid batteries in my 1973 GE Elec-Trak tractor will peak over 300 Amps at 36 VDC into a snowblower or tiller motor, or even into the main traction motor if you're pushing or pulling something really heavy. As long as all your connections are clean nothing melts (if you have crappy connections, though, you can burn the post off a battery).

There's an 18 KW power line ten feet from my house, about 35 feet from the Level 2 charger that my wife uses to charge her Nissan Leaf. Why would high current be a problem? It's easily available in most of the developed world, certainly most of the USA. And chargers don't deliver juice until they've handshaken with the pack (well, in the 1973 tractor that's not true, but certainly in modern electric vehicles).

Yeah, but very likely no

[WindBourne]

NTU is the same university that had a capacitor that would change the world.
And that was 3 years ago.

My bet is that nothing comes from this.

Re:100 amperes is a manageable value

[DocSavage64109]

Um yeah, just let me plug my cord into this 10,000 volt wall outlet over here... That doesn't sound dangerous at all! :D

Re:I hoping so bad China

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, if the oil companies have been suppressing EV technologies, their shareholders should be suing the CEOs for professional incompetence.

Control. At the moment there is a hen and egg situation where switching energy production to carbon neutral doesn't solve every issue since cars still emit a lot. Switching cars to electric also doesn't solve anything since the energy is generated with coal anyway.
If one of them were solved the other one would become very beneficial for society. As long as both are kept were they are the step to get anywhere is a lot harder to take.

Ten K watt hours

[Anonymous Coward]

The article mentions that EV batteries can cost over $5,000. Clearly, they are not talking about the Tesla with replacement batteries starting in the $30,000+ range. With a cost of about $500 per one kilowatt hour they are talking about a small 10kwh battery being charged in about 5 minutes. That is not unreasonable, although the heat transference might still be an issue.

It would still require huge infrastructure changes

[lightbounce]

Even if you could recharge a car in 5 minute, service stations would require massive upgrades in electrical capacity to do it. It's not something that could be done with standard 220V lines. For long distance trips on Interstates in the western US, you would have to run heavy duty electrical cables for dozens if not hundreds of miles.

Re:I hoping so bad China

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuclear cars are.. not impossible.. but I don't know how practical it would be to build a nuclear cell both small enough and safe enough to put in a car at the same time.

If it can't be made small enough for a car, how about a bus?

Re:I hoping so bad China

[Anonymous Coward]

Yay! Now we can break free of the oil and gas companies evil grasp by using electricity... that will up the demand for oil and gas powered electricity generation

Oy. Even if you're running from the same fuel, energy from a power plant is far more efficient than a combustion engine.

70% is now actually labelled as FULL

[Anonymous Coward]

So, with a 2-min charge to 70%, I see the future of car battery gauges to label 70% as full, so that complete-ists like myself don't feel the need to fill the battery to actual full by waiting the extra 5-10 minutes for a full charge.

Sell it to me

[CauseBy]

I'm jaded with battery claims. Oh, you built a better battery? Fine, make a product and sell it to me. If it's a better battery then I'll pay you well for your invention, but don't talk to me about research because I've heard it before.

Kinda

[Brannon]

Due to losses in transmission you'll need to apply somewhat more than 85kW on average over an hour to fully charge an empty 85kWh battery.

That doesn't have anything to do with the charge rate of Lion cells, though. The cells and assocated hardware limit the charge rate as one approaches capacity, so you charge at 120kW early on and much lower than that as we approach capacity. The average power will be ~85kW to charge an empty 85kWh battery in one hour (plus maybe 10% for transmission losses).

Dammit

[Anonymous Coward]

So my hippy comune still cant have jacuzzi"s without staying of the grid?

Diodes get very hot...

[Futurepower(R)]

Diodes get very hot because they are dissipating power.

See, this is weird

[Anonymous Coward]

First you complain that electric batteries take too long to recharge and that until you can get it done in the same time as a gas refill, then electric cars are worthless toys for econazihippies.

Then when they say you CAN charge it up in the time it takes to fill the tank of gas, you shout "THIS CANNOT BE DONE!!!".

Was that the reason why you made the former claim? Because you didn't want to let anyone take your gas away from you, so gave an "impossible" requirement to fulfill?

only two questions:

[Anonymous Coward]

how long can it hold a charge without draining

and

how much loss is there when battery temp approaches 32 F?

China's Uni's have better PR that the US ones

[ras]

I'm struggling to see what's different here to what was done 3 years ago. In other words, self annealing fast charge batteries using a titanium dioxide nanotube anode aren't new. The linked article says capacity for the Na variant of the cell is 144 W.h/Kg, which compares to around 250 for LiPo batteries. The linked article also says they had it working for Li at higher densities.

But it hasn't taken over the world yet, and so there must be some problem with it. Maybe the nanotubes cost a small fortune.

As for those of you whining about charging a car in 5 minutes, maybe it is a bit optimistic. But I'd happily settle for charging my phone in 10 minutes via 100W USB C connection.

Re:China's Uni's have better PR that the US ones

[ras]

Ah, here is a much better description of what they did. In short: their real breakthrough was to grow longer TiO2 nanotubes. They then re-did the work in the previous like to what difference the longer nanotubes made. Turned out it sped up the charge/discharge rate. At 30C they got 6K cycles at 86% capacity, which is where the 20 years comes from. The smaller length tubes had 10K cycles, so it a charge rate versus cycles trade off. As they said, it puts them in super capacitor territory but I'm not sure how that's helpful. We already have super capacitors. We need cheaper batteries.