Even Lithium Polymer batteries burn fairly violently when they overheat or get punctured, though. If you've never watched one burn, you should do so. Gas tanks in cars don't have a habit of suddenly bursting into flames while you fill up your tank, the rare static discharge notwithstanding.
LiPo are a traditional li-ion chemistry -- LiCoO2 + graphite. They suffer from the exact same plating problem, the exact same overcharge problems, and on and on down the list as your standard 18650 cells. That is *not* what any EV manufacturer (except for Tesla) is using. What you're arguing is like arguing that because tin melts at low temperatures, we shouldn't make a radiator out of steel. It's just a silly line of argument.
Your assertion that batteries last longer if they have greater capacity is certainly true, but I fail to see what bearing that has on my assertion that NiMH batteries aren't practical for car use much beyond hybrids because of their limited energy density.
Wow, yet *another* line of argument! You hadn't brought up NiMH packs yet (I brought them up once as an example of how batteries need not inherently have short lifespans, and that it all depends on the chemistry). Whether NiMHs are practical for EV applications in the present day is irrelevant because that's not what's being proposed; we're talking about the stable olivine and spinel cathodes and the stable titanate anodes in a li-ion cell. They're actually *more* cycle tolerant than NiMH. I wouldn't call NiMH impractical, mind you -- it's just not as good as the advanced li-ions.
On the issue of Lithium and health, yes, it exists in nature. So does uranium. That doesn't mean I want to add more of it to my drinking water.
It'd be an irrelevant percentage increase *even if* the landfills leaked, because it's already in your drinking water. Lithium is deemed such a low risk chemical that it's completely unregulated in tapwater. Let me repeat that: there is no legal limit for lithium in tap water in the US..
Lithium salts have fairly well understood impacts on the human nervous system, so to imply that there's no risk by dumping this stuff is reckless and irresponsible, IMHO.
We dump things that are far, far, far, far, far more bioactive than lithium into our waste every day. Given how livid you are about lithium, why aren't you out there protesting them? Run! Run! Lithium requires 15mg/kg before you get any neurological effects from it. To put that into perspective, that's about 1/4th the lethal dose of nicotine. It's 1.5 billion times higher of a concentration than botulinum toxin takes to kill you. And to top it all off, lithium has no psychotrophic effects on normal patients. Every year, every American dumps a quarter pound of lead into landfills just from picture tube TVs alone (they only have an 18% recycling rate). Run! You've got to stop it! If you care this much about lithium of all things, certainly you care about that appalling amount of lead entering out landfills! Where's your TV recycling protest? Every year, the average driver drives 12,000 miles, emitting huge quantities of VOCs, carbon monoxide, particulate matter, NOx, and SOx straight into our air at surface level, an environmental consequence a thousand times worse than any you would get from a 0% rate of LiP battery recycling. Why aren't you out there stopping them!? You could get rid of most of that simply by a quick switch to electric cars, after all.;)
Your outrage at lithium is just silly and completely disproportional to the environmental consequences involved.
Unlike metal car parts that are recycled at a near 100% rate when looked at over the long term
False. It's about 75%.
Similarly, regarding your comparison with lead acid batteries, it is true that lead-acid batteries contain more substances that shouldn't be disposed of. There are also laws that require them to be recycled and
It's not just for psychological conditions. It's also used to treat ALS, for example, and helps fight cluster headaches. The dose of lithium needed to have an effect is pretty large -- 15-20mg/kg, just under the lethal dose -- and it has no apparent psychoactive effects in normal patients. FYI, mineral water is generally 0.05mg/l to 1mg/l lithium.
I can't understand why so many people are so concerned about lithium. Is it just because it sounds exotic? Lithium some super-rare element in our natural world. It's the ~17th most common element in the oceans and the ~31st most common in the crust. Yeah, if you use lithium salt as a substitute for table salt it could kill you, but apart from that, it's not particularly problematic. It's not long-term bioaccumulative and it's LD-50 is well higher than anything you could get without intentional ingestion. There are tons of things far worse than lithium that we throw into landfills on a regular basis. If you want to talk about health risks, just look at what comes out of tailpipes: carcinogenic VOCs, lung-disease inducing particulate matter, irritating NOx and SOx, cardiotoxic carbon monoxide, and so on down the list.
You mean their ReCharge concept? My list was only companies with A) solid production plans, and B) either an established name or having shown solid progress towards their goal. Concept cars not included:) Also, they had to be cars, trucks, minivans, or SUVs -- no large commercial trucks or electric motorcycles.
1. I don't just mean catching fire, but sure, let's go with that. Lithium cells don't stop burning until the contents are power. Lithium can burn through steel. Even gasoline fires won't do that. Lithium also can reignite after you put the fire out. I'm assuming Lithium because quite frankly no other battery tech has enough energy density to really be viable, last time I checked.
Lithium ion batteries contain no metallic lithium. Now, traditional li-ion batteries have a defect, where when they age significantly or are charged in sub-freezing temperatures, metallic lithium can plate out. This ruins the batteries. This effect does not happen in the advanced li-ions that are being considered for use in EVs. *There Is No Metallic Lithium In Them*.
2. Yes, lots of batteries last a long time. Let's put that in perspective. Those advanced Li Ion batteries are still only rated for a couple of decades.
That's a great point, because as you know, the average person keeps their car around for about 4,000 years.;)
Also, the Rav4 EV had a maximum range per charge of roughly a third what is expected from a consumer vehicle, and requires five hours to charge, which is also unacceptable for most people.
Which is, of course, completely unrelated to the topic of how long batteries take to charge, but if you'd like to talk about that, that'd be golden!:) The more the range an EV has, the *longer* its battery pack lasts. Each cell goes through fewer cycles per mile travelled. As for charge times, phosphates and stabilized spinels can fully charge in 10 to 20 minutes. Titanates can fully charge pretty much as fast as you can cool them down; individual cells have been charged to 80% in under a minute, while pack charging times are more in the 5 to 10 minute range due to cooling. The titanates are capable of such fast charges and are so stable in doing so that they're being promoted for grid stabilization, where the grid feeds megawatts of power into them or pulls it out of them depending on its needs, with cycle times on the order of 5 to 10 minutes, over and over nonstop for decades.
3. Sure, it's not as nasty as some stuff, but if you're just throwing these things in the trash every few years---even every twenty years---that's a significant amount of metal salts leaching into the soil.
Lithium is not a heavy metal. It's not toxic. Heaven forbid that the average person throw away, say, LiPs, which are made from about 1kg of lithium carbonate per kilowatt hour, so ~30 kg for a ~30kWh pack, once every couple decades, when I dump that much sodium salts on my driveway every couple years. Much better is to burn a hundred kilograms of gasoline straight into the air every year, right? Mmm, I love the smell of VOCs in the morning!
Disposing of these batteries is a nothing environmental consequence. The metal in the car's frame poses more of an environmental consequence as the batteries (hey, ever looked what's in alloying agents?). The plastics in the interior probably pose more environmental consequences. So do the tires. Heck, the *single* lead-acid battery in a conventional car is probably ten times more of an environmental risk than an entire EV LiP battery pack. Or antifreeze for that matter. LiP battery disposal is simply not an issue.
I'd be concerned about the health effects if that much of these chemicals end up in our water supply.
You do realize that mineral water contains 0.05-1mg/l of lithium *already*? Lithium isn't exactly rare. And seriously, do you *really* want to try and avoid lithium? Better boycott lithium greases! Better boycott air conditioners! Better boycott glazed glasses! I could go on for days. Lithium is used all over the place.
I would also add that the biggest problem with batteries is charge time.
You have a problem with 5 to 20 minute charges every 2-3 hours of driving? Because that's *current* tech. Let alone what we'll have in five years.
I guess that depends on your definition of "heavy metal"; the term is poorly defined, although I don't think anyone would dispute lead or that many would dispute cadmium. Cobalt is atomic number 27 and only mildly toxic (small amounts of it are even required in the body, and the body gets rid of it reasonably well); its LD50 in rats is 6,171mg/kg -- twice that of table salt. Iron is atomic number 26 and... well, deficiency is far more common than having too much, so I don't think people are going to complain about that.;) I suppose that if you went by what's probably the least common definition -- density in their metallic states -- then you could call them heavy metals (although not *that* heavy). But, of course, they're not in their metallic states.
Lithium is not a "nasty substance", and it's not found in raw form, either in production or in the batteries, anyways (they use lithium salts, like lithium carbonate, a common red colorant in fireworks, for that). Try again.
I guess we're not supposed to care that pharmaceutical companies today spend more money on advertising than on research. Chalk that up to the "efficiencies of the free market" or something.
Checkout healthcare costs in Japan. They're incredibly low. You get sick in Japan, you don't sit around and debate whether you should see someone; you just go.
I once had a professor of Japanese Society from the US who found that it was cheaper to fly to Japan, get a hotel room, and pay out of his pocket for dental work, then fly back home than to have *his insurance cover it* in the US. He decided to have his dental work done in Japan after being treated for cancer over there; he had had major surgery, including having a lung removed. He had his doctors itemize every treatement done, down to the pain killers in his room, and brought it back to his doctor in the US. According to his doctor, it literally would have cost him over ten times as much over here.
I can't say why medical care is so much cheaper over there, but it is.
Private investors have not because they don't see any opportunity at this point for it to become a profitable viable technology.
Yes, marques have plans to produce and commercially sell EVs within the next few years. Except, of course, Aptera, Audi, BMW, BYD, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Daimler AG, Duracar, Fisker, Ford, Heuliez, Hyundai, Lightning Car Co, Loremo, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Miles, Mitsubishi, Nissan-Renault, Phoenix, Pininfarina/Bollare, Range Rover, Saturn, Shelby Supercars, Subaru, Tata, Tesla, Th!nk, Toyota, Venturi, and Volkswagen. But apart from them...
I could give you a similar list for battery manufacturers if you're interested.
Besides, battery technology is not the most effective way to power cars. They are too volatile, have too short a life expectancy, and produce too much nasty chemical waste (both during manufacture and disposal).
False.
1) I don't know what you mean by "volatile", but if you mean "catching fire", that's mainly just a problem for traditional li-ion. The phosphates, titanates, and stabilized spinels don't do that because they don't get lithium metal plating and the like. The worst you can say for the advanced li-ion cells is that the electrolyte is often flammable, and that if you had both a puncture and a spark (puncture alone won't cut it), you could get fire. But you know what? So is gasoline. At least the electrolyte is isolated into a bunch of small containers that would, worst case, fail individually.
2) The life expectancy notion is way off. Let's start by busting the basic premise -- that all batteries inherently have to have short lifespans. Jay Leno's early-20th century Baker Electric still runs on its original nickel-iron batteries. Decade-old RAV4EVs are still running fine on their original NiMH packs despite heavy usage. It's simply a myth that there's something inherently about being a battery that means you must have a short lifespan; it all depends on the chemistry. And getting to the advanced li-ion types being looked at -- the various olivine and spinel cathodes and titanate anodes -- they're incredibly stable. Assuming you keep the temperature in the packs from getting ridiculously hot, you're good for the lifespan of the car. A123 and Valence's LiPs, for example, are good for about 7,000 cycles at 1C before losing 20% capacity. AltairNano's titanates take tens of thousands of cycles to lose that much.
3) What nasty chemicals do you think are involved here? The worst you can say is that the titanates, like traditional li-ion, have a LiCoO2 cathode. But that's only mildly toxic. Phosphates and spinels, you can literally throw straight into the trash in some places. The worst thing in them is that the electrolyte is corrosive. Manufacture is no worse. Phosphates, for example, traditionally have their cathodes made from phosphoric acid, iron powder, and lithium carbonate, with a carbon binding from burning sugar. The anodes are just graphite. The separator is just plastic.
You've clearly never read any calculations for space elevators, so let me just sum up for you: you're way, way off. To prevent a ridiculous taper factor, even on Mars you need dozens of GPa with a density less than graphene. Even the highest capacity of elevator designs, for moving millions of tons per year, have a mass of just grams per meter. As for reentry, only the lowest parts aren't moving fast enough; the overwhelming majority of the tether enters at incredible speed and is trivial to burn up. No, it doesn't fall "down"; that's not how the forces play out. And as for whiplash, I'll again repeat myself: any extra stress *will simply snap the tether*. These are structures at the limits of what physics itself allows, and you physically can put a margin of error on them that's too much stronger than the stress that simply existing puts on the tether.
If you want to read calculations for yourself, check out Dr. Edwards work. Or, alternatively, you could just sit around on Slashdot and assert patently untrue things without reference to any scientific study.
Regarding the tech specs you were given: Do you have whitepapers showing differently?
You know, you could do the most basic research and find out for yourself. The titanates have been cycled *tens* of thousands of times before reaching 20% charge degradation. A123's "nanophosphate" cells take about 7000 cycles for the same. LG Chem's spinels are similar. Or, rather than taking that on its face, you could simply look at the sort of warranties upcoming EVs are being announced with.
Thermal degradation (cells losing power when they are outside their "optimal" operating temperature range) is a particularly vexing problem of every single battery and capacitor technology in use today.
Which is precisely why battery packs are cooled. Didn't that occur to you? Apparently not.
And that's not counting the damage to the "reserve battery" of holding a full charge indefinitely "until needed." There is indeed nothing in the world quite like finding out your "failsafe" device has failed.
Obviously that's not how it's done. How it's actually done is how Tesla does it -- your charge meter only shows a percentage of the maximum charge as available. When you hit zero, it then puts you into "reserve" mode for the rest.
I'd just like to note that nobody has yet designed an electric car to do either of the things you suggest.
And it's not like Nissan-Renault, Project Better Place, and several entire *countries* are funnelling tens of billions of dollars into precisely that.
I personally favor fast-charging because it doesn't require standardization of a rapidly moving target (battery tech) for vehicles that have different battery needs -- but it is an option.
I'd be willing to bet on 2 to 1 odds that we're going to have a nationwide HVDC well under construction by the end of Obama's presidency, if not fully functioning by that point. All of the signs point toward it.
1) It was part of his policy platform when campaigning, and came up several times during debates/interviews. 2) When announcing his massive, massive federal jobs program, one of the main things he said it would do was "repower America" 3) He picked Chu as his energy secretary; Chu has long been a major proponent of nationwide HVDC. Here's a random example. Really, what a thrill to have someone like him as energy secretary.
Battery capacity, charge times, etc., all need to improve by an order of magnitude.
So, just to use the Phoenix SUT as a starting point and improving it by an order of magnitude, you're saying that you want electric cars that go 1,500 miles per charge and charge to 80% in 30 seconds? Or are you still under the misconception that EVs only go 50 miles or so and inherently take hours to recharge?
State of the art but commercially available battery tech is the titanates, which get ~70Wh/kg and can recharge as fast as you can provide the power and cool the pack (individual cells have been charged to 80% in one minute), or phosphates and stabilized spinels which get ~100Wh/kg and can recharge in 10 to 20 minutes. Traditional li-ion now gets nearly 180Wh/kg, but is limited to 1 hour charging minimum and won't last the lifespan of the car (unlike the aforementioned techs). To get weight/range parity with a typical gasoline vehicle, you need about 300-400Wh/kg, which is what about a dozen different next-gen battery techs are promising. Personally, all I care about is the ability to drive for about two hours on a charge; I don't see the point to more since I'm not going to want to have to be sitting down for that long in a row.
As for chargers, the highest power EV chargers I've seen are 250kW. The highest I know of that are already installed for general use are the 60kW Aerovironment Posicharge chargers in Oahu. For a 200Wh/mi EV charging at 250kW, that's 21 miles range per minute of charging, meaning that charging makes up under 5% of your travel time.
In short, while the state of the art tech isn't perfect yet, it's not half bad.
You must have mixed up capitalization when reading about the Windbelt, because its power output is measured in mW, not MW.;) Yes, he updated his estimate to saying his latest version costs "$2 per watt", but then he makes himself look like an idiot by saying that this is cheaper than solar. These price per watt figures are per watt under a given set of standard conditions (25C, 1000W/m^2, etc), and the standard conditions for solar are in no way related to whatever conditions he used for wind. Judging from his earlier experiments, probably a desk fan.
Basically, we don't have much to go on re. Windbelt apart from what Frayne has stated.
He even took it to the point of examining what happens when the terrorists from Earth blow up the link cable that connected the orbital portion, resulting in the elevator 'crashing' down to Mars. He even correctly showed how it would actually wrap around the planet (as opposed to falling straight) and when the final piece impacted it caused a huge crater from the sheer kinetic energy. (like a whip-lash).
Which is, of course, not what would happen. One, the cable must be *incredibly* lightweight per unit length for it to work out at all. Two, any unprotected structure like that would easily vaporize on reentry, even in Mars' tenuous atmosphere. Three, there would be no whiplash, as any unexpectedly strong downforce on the cable, such as "whipping", would simply snap it.
Wind has only become cost competitive in the last decade, so expecting it to make up 40% of anywhere's supply is just silly. You need to look at rate of growth of wind, and the rate of growth of wind is astronomical. Rate of growth of nuclear is negative. And it's not that nuclear is being somehow blocked by NIMBYs the nation over; it's that nuclear power, at least the current generation (there's some hope for next-gen) is just way too expensive per kilowatt hour.
I don't know what company your friend works for, but all I can say is that were I live, wind farms are popping up like weeds.
We're adding a percent or two *per year*. It's a rapid transition from "almost none" to "nearly as much as we get from nuclear". And it's at prices cheaper than nuclear. And we're only tapping the tiniest fraction of the available windpower here; the turbine farms are still few and far between.
Call it "supplemental" all you want, but here in Iowa, nuclear is supplemental, and wind is rapidly headed towards being a major portion of our supply.
Since when do you need to fast charge at home? Fast charging is only needed for while on the road. And yes, there are commercial fast chargers for those situations that are cost-competitive with gas station prices per-pump (I posted prices for them earlier in this thread). The bigger ones don't draw straight from the grid -- they use internal battery banks. The biggest ones I've seen are around 250kW.
In case you're not good with math, 30,000,000,000 square meters divided by 1000 is 30,000,000 square meters. That's 11.5 square miles -- 3.4 miles on a side, not 45.
And, for your information, there are these things called rooftops...
Oh really? They've never worked? Because here I am in a state with almost 8% of it's power from wind, approaching our share from nuclear (11%-ish). Wind should pass nuclear in the next five years or so up here. Just a couple years ago it was less than half as much as we got from nuclear. Better explain it to my utilities that what they're doing is impossible.
Wind in the great plains is actually cheaper than nuclear per kilowatt hour. It's almost cost-competitive with coal.
Slashdot Mirror
Even Lithium Polymer batteries burn fairly violently when they overheat or get punctured, though. If you've never watched one burn, you should do so. Gas tanks in cars don't have a habit of suddenly bursting into flames while you fill up your tank, the rare static discharge notwithstanding.
LiPo are a traditional li-ion chemistry -- LiCoO2 + graphite. They suffer from the exact same plating problem, the exact same overcharge problems, and on and on down the list as your standard 18650 cells. That is *not* what any EV manufacturer (except for Tesla) is using. What you're arguing is like arguing that because tin melts at low temperatures, we shouldn't make a radiator out of steel. It's just a silly line of argument.
Your assertion that batteries last longer if they have greater capacity is certainly true, but I fail to see what bearing that has on my assertion that NiMH batteries aren't practical for car use much beyond hybrids because of their limited energy density.
Wow, yet *another* line of argument! You hadn't brought up NiMH packs yet (I brought them up once as an example of how batteries need not inherently have short lifespans, and that it all depends on the chemistry). Whether NiMHs are practical for EV applications in the present day is irrelevant because that's not what's being proposed; we're talking about the stable olivine and spinel cathodes and the stable titanate anodes in a li-ion cell. They're actually *more* cycle tolerant than NiMH. I wouldn't call NiMH impractical, mind you -- it's just not as good as the advanced li-ions.
On the issue of Lithium and health, yes, it exists in nature. So does uranium. That doesn't mean I want to add more of it to my drinking water.
It'd be an irrelevant percentage increase *even if* the landfills leaked, because it's already in your drinking water. Lithium is deemed such a low risk chemical that it's completely unregulated in tapwater. Let me repeat that: there is no legal limit for lithium in tap water in the US..
Lithium salts have fairly well understood impacts on the human nervous system, so to imply that there's no risk by dumping this stuff is reckless and irresponsible, IMHO.
We dump things that are far, far, far, far, far more bioactive than lithium into our waste every day. Given how livid you are about lithium, why aren't you out there protesting them? Run! Run! Lithium requires 15mg/kg before you get any neurological effects from it. To put that into perspective, that's about 1/4th the lethal dose of nicotine. It's 1.5 billion times higher of a concentration than botulinum toxin takes to kill you. And to top it all off, lithium has no psychotrophic effects on normal patients. Every year, every American dumps a quarter pound of lead into landfills just from picture tube TVs alone (they only have an 18% recycling rate). Run! You've got to stop it! If you care this much about lithium of all things, certainly you care about that appalling amount of lead entering out landfills! Where's your TV recycling protest? Every year, the average driver drives 12,000 miles, emitting huge quantities of VOCs, carbon monoxide, particulate matter, NOx, and SOx straight into our air at surface level, an environmental consequence a thousand times worse than any you would get from a 0% rate of LiP battery recycling. Why aren't you out there stopping them!? You could get rid of most of that simply by a quick switch to electric cars, after all. ;)
Your outrage at lithium is just silly and completely disproportional to the environmental consequences involved.
Unlike metal car parts that are recycled at a near 100% rate when looked at over the long term
False. It's about 75%.
Similarly, regarding your comparison with lead acid batteries, it is true that lead-acid batteries contain more substances that shouldn't be disposed of. There are also laws that require them to be recycled and
It's not just for psychological conditions. It's also used to treat ALS, for example, and helps fight cluster headaches. The dose of lithium needed to have an effect is pretty large -- 15-20mg/kg, just under the lethal dose -- and it has no apparent psychoactive effects in normal patients. FYI, mineral water is generally 0.05mg/l to 1mg/l lithium.
I can't understand why so many people are so concerned about lithium. Is it just because it sounds exotic? Lithium some super-rare element in our natural world. It's the ~17th most common element in the oceans and the ~31st most common in the crust. Yeah, if you use lithium salt as a substitute for table salt it could kill you, but apart from that, it's not particularly problematic. It's not long-term bioaccumulative and it's LD-50 is well higher than anything you could get without intentional ingestion. There are tons of things far worse than lithium that we throw into landfills on a regular basis. If you want to talk about health risks, just look at what comes out of tailpipes: carcinogenic VOCs, lung-disease inducing particulate matter, irritating NOx and SOx, cardiotoxic carbon monoxide, and so on down the list.
You mean their ReCharge concept? My list was only companies with A) solid production plans, and B) either an established name or having shown solid progress towards their goal. Concept cars not included :) Also, they had to be cars, trucks, minivans, or SUVs -- no large commercial trucks or electric motorcycles.
You're just digging yourself into a deeper hole.
1. I don't just mean catching fire, but sure, let's go with that. Lithium cells don't stop burning until the contents are power. Lithium can burn through steel. Even gasoline fires won't do that. Lithium also can reignite after you put the fire out. I'm assuming Lithium because quite frankly no other battery tech has enough energy density to really be viable, last time I checked.
Lithium ion batteries contain no metallic lithium. Now, traditional li-ion batteries have a defect, where when they age significantly or are charged in sub-freezing temperatures, metallic lithium can plate out. This ruins the batteries. This effect does not happen in the advanced li-ions that are being considered for use in EVs. *There Is No Metallic Lithium In Them*.
2. Yes, lots of batteries last a long time. Let's put that in perspective. Those advanced Li Ion batteries are still only rated for a couple of decades.
That's a great point, because as you know, the average person keeps their car around for about 4,000 years. ;)
Also, the Rav4 EV had a maximum range per charge of roughly a third what is expected from a consumer vehicle, and requires five hours to charge, which is also unacceptable for most people.
Which is, of course, completely unrelated to the topic of how long batteries take to charge, but if you'd like to talk about that, that'd be golden! :) The more the range an EV has, the *longer* its battery pack lasts. Each cell goes through fewer cycles per mile travelled. As for charge times, phosphates and stabilized spinels can fully charge in 10 to 20 minutes. Titanates can fully charge pretty much as fast as you can cool them down; individual cells have been charged to 80% in under a minute, while pack charging times are more in the 5 to 10 minute range due to cooling. The titanates are capable of such fast charges and are so stable in doing so that they're being promoted for grid stabilization, where the grid feeds megawatts of power into them or pulls it out of them depending on its needs, with cycle times on the order of 5 to 10 minutes, over and over nonstop for decades.
3. Sure, it's not as nasty as some stuff, but if you're just throwing these things in the trash every few years---even every twenty years---that's a significant amount of metal salts leaching into the soil.
Lithium is not a heavy metal. It's not toxic. Heaven forbid that the average person throw away, say, LiPs, which are made from about 1kg of lithium carbonate per kilowatt hour, so ~30 kg for a ~30kWh pack, once every couple decades, when I dump that much sodium salts on my driveway every couple years. Much better is to burn a hundred kilograms of gasoline straight into the air every year, right? Mmm, I love the smell of VOCs in the morning!
Disposing of these batteries is a nothing environmental consequence. The metal in the car's frame poses more of an environmental consequence as the batteries (hey, ever looked what's in alloying agents?). The plastics in the interior probably pose more environmental consequences. So do the tires. Heck, the *single* lead-acid battery in a conventional car is probably ten times more of an environmental risk than an entire EV LiP battery pack. Or antifreeze for that matter. LiP battery disposal is simply not an issue.
I'd be concerned about the health effects if that much of these chemicals end up in our water supply.
You do realize that mineral water contains 0.05-1mg/l of lithium *already*? Lithium isn't exactly rare. And seriously, do you *really* want to try and avoid lithium? Better boycott lithium greases! Better boycott air conditioners! Better boycott glazed glasses! I could go on for days. Lithium is used all over the place.
I would also add that the biggest problem with batteries is charge time.
You have a problem with 5 to 20 minute charges every 2-3 hours of driving? Because that's *current* tech. Let alone what we'll have in five years.
I guess that depends on your definition of "heavy metal"; the term is poorly defined, although I don't think anyone would dispute lead or that many would dispute cadmium. Cobalt is atomic number 27 and only mildly toxic (small amounts of it are even required in the body, and the body gets rid of it reasonably well); its LD50 in rats is 6,171mg/kg -- twice that of table salt. Iron is atomic number 26 and... well, deficiency is far more common than having too much, so I don't think people are going to complain about that. ;) I suppose that if you went by what's probably the least common definition -- density in their metallic states -- then you could call them heavy metals (although not *that* heavy). But, of course, they're not in their metallic states.
Lithium is not a "nasty substance", and it's not found in raw form, either in production or in the batteries, anyways (they use lithium salts, like lithium carbonate, a common red colorant in fireworks, for that). Try again.
I guess we're not supposed to care that pharmaceutical companies today spend more money on advertising than on research. Chalk that up to the "efficiencies of the free market" or something.
So, praytell, what heavy metals go into lithium ion batteries? That's what we're talking about, after all.
(A: You're thinking of PbA and NiCd)
Checkout healthcare costs in Japan. They're incredibly low. You get sick in Japan, you don't sit around and debate whether you should see someone; you just go.
I once had a professor of Japanese Society from the US who found that it was cheaper to fly to Japan, get a hotel room, and pay out of his pocket for dental work, then fly back home than to have *his insurance cover it* in the US. He decided to have his dental work done in Japan after being treated for cancer over there; he had had major surgery, including having a lung removed. He had his doctors itemize every treatement done, down to the pain killers in his room, and brought it back to his doctor in the US. According to his doctor, it literally would have cost him over ten times as much over here.
I can't say why medical care is so much cheaper over there, but it is.
Private investors have not because they don't see any opportunity at this point for it to become a profitable viable technology.
Yes, marques have plans to produce and commercially sell EVs within the next few years. Except, of course, Aptera, Audi, BMW, BYD, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Daimler AG, Duracar, Fisker, Ford, Heuliez, Hyundai, Lightning Car Co, Loremo, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Miles, Mitsubishi, Nissan-Renault, Phoenix, Pininfarina/Bollare, Range Rover, Saturn, Shelby Supercars, Subaru, Tata, Tesla, Th!nk, Toyota, Venturi, and Volkswagen. But apart from them...
I could give you a similar list for battery manufacturers if you're interested.
Besides, battery technology is not the most effective way to power cars. They are too volatile, have too short a life expectancy, and produce too much nasty chemical waste (both during manufacture and disposal).
False.
1) I don't know what you mean by "volatile", but if you mean "catching fire", that's mainly just a problem for traditional li-ion. The phosphates, titanates, and stabilized spinels don't do that because they don't get lithium metal plating and the like. The worst you can say for the advanced li-ion cells is that the electrolyte is often flammable, and that if you had both a puncture and a spark (puncture alone won't cut it), you could get fire. But you know what? So is gasoline. At least the electrolyte is isolated into a bunch of small containers that would, worst case, fail individually.
2) The life expectancy notion is way off. Let's start by busting the basic premise -- that all batteries inherently have to have short lifespans. Jay Leno's early-20th century Baker Electric still runs on its original nickel-iron batteries. Decade-old RAV4EVs are still running fine on their original NiMH packs despite heavy usage. It's simply a myth that there's something inherently about being a battery that means you must have a short lifespan; it all depends on the chemistry. And getting to the advanced li-ion types being looked at -- the various olivine and spinel cathodes and titanate anodes -- they're incredibly stable. Assuming you keep the temperature in the packs from getting ridiculously hot, you're good for the lifespan of the car. A123 and Valence's LiPs, for example, are good for about 7,000 cycles at 1C before losing 20% capacity. AltairNano's titanates take tens of thousands of cycles to lose that much.
3) What nasty chemicals do you think are involved here? The worst you can say is that the titanates, like traditional li-ion, have a LiCoO2 cathode. But that's only mildly toxic. Phosphates and spinels, you can literally throw straight into the trash in some places. The worst thing in them is that the electrolyte is corrosive. Manufacture is no worse. Phosphates, for example, traditionally have their cathodes made from phosphoric acid, iron powder, and lithium carbonate, with a carbon binding from burning sugar. The anodes are just graphite. The separator is just plastic.
What sort of "nasty substances" do you think are "involved" in, say, lithium iron phosphate cells?
You've clearly never read any calculations for space elevators, so let me just sum up for you: you're way, way off. To prevent a ridiculous taper factor, even on Mars you need dozens of GPa with a density less than graphene. Even the highest capacity of elevator designs, for moving millions of tons per year, have a mass of just grams per meter. As for reentry, only the lowest parts aren't moving fast enough; the overwhelming majority of the tether enters at incredible speed and is trivial to burn up. No, it doesn't fall "down"; that's not how the forces play out. And as for whiplash, I'll again repeat myself: any extra stress *will simply snap the tether*. These are structures at the limits of what physics itself allows, and you physically can put a margin of error on them that's too much stronger than the stress that simply existing puts on the tether.
If you want to read calculations for yourself, check out Dr. Edwards work. Or, alternatively, you could just sit around on Slashdot and assert patently untrue things without reference to any scientific study.
Regarding the tech specs you were given: Do you have whitepapers showing differently?
You know, you could do the most basic research and find out for yourself. The titanates have been cycled *tens* of thousands of times before reaching 20% charge degradation. A123's "nanophosphate" cells take about 7000 cycles for the same. LG Chem's spinels are similar. Or, rather than taking that on its face, you could simply look at the sort of warranties upcoming EVs are being announced with.
Thermal degradation (cells losing power when they are outside their "optimal" operating temperature range) is a particularly vexing problem of every single battery and capacitor technology in use today.
Which is precisely why battery packs are cooled. Didn't that occur to you? Apparently not.
And that's not counting the damage to the "reserve battery" of holding a full charge indefinitely "until needed." There is indeed nothing in the world quite like finding out your "failsafe" device has failed.
Obviously that's not how it's done. How it's actually done is how Tesla does it -- your charge meter only shows a percentage of the maximum charge as available. When you hit zero, it then puts you into "reserve" mode for the rest.
I'd just like to note that nobody has yet designed an electric car to do either of the things you suggest.
And it's not like Nissan-Renault, Project Better Place, and several entire *countries* are funnelling tens of billions of dollars into precisely that.
I personally favor fast-charging because it doesn't require standardization of a rapidly moving target (battery tech) for vehicles that have different battery needs -- but it is an option.
I'd be willing to bet on 2 to 1 odds that we're going to have a nationwide HVDC well under construction by the end of Obama's presidency, if not fully functioning by that point. All of the signs point toward it.
1) It was part of his policy platform when campaigning, and came up several times during debates/interviews.
2) When announcing his massive, massive federal jobs program, one of the main things he said it would do was "repower America"
3) He picked Chu as his energy secretary; Chu has long been a major proponent of nationwide HVDC. Here's a random example. Really, what a thrill to have someone like him as energy secretary.
Battery capacity, charge times, etc., all need to improve by an order of magnitude.
So, just to use the Phoenix SUT as a starting point and improving it by an order of magnitude, you're saying that you want electric cars that go 1,500 miles per charge and charge to 80% in 30 seconds? Or are you still under the misconception that EVs only go 50 miles or so and inherently take hours to recharge?
State of the art but commercially available battery tech is the titanates, which get ~70Wh/kg and can recharge as fast as you can provide the power and cool the pack (individual cells have been charged to 80% in one minute), or phosphates and stabilized spinels which get ~100Wh/kg and can recharge in 10 to 20 minutes. Traditional li-ion now gets nearly 180Wh/kg, but is limited to 1 hour charging minimum and won't last the lifespan of the car (unlike the aforementioned techs). To get weight/range parity with a typical gasoline vehicle, you need about 300-400Wh/kg, which is what about a dozen different next-gen battery techs are promising. Personally, all I care about is the ability to drive for about two hours on a charge; I don't see the point to more since I'm not going to want to have to be sitting down for that long in a row.
As for chargers, the highest power EV chargers I've seen are 250kW. The highest I know of that are already installed for general use are the 60kW Aerovironment Posicharge chargers in Oahu. For a 200Wh/mi EV charging at 250kW, that's 21 miles range per minute of charging, meaning that charging makes up under 5% of your travel time.
In short, while the state of the art tech isn't perfect yet, it's not half bad.
You must have mixed up capitalization when reading about the Windbelt, because its power output is measured in mW, not MW. ;) Yes, he updated his estimate to saying his latest version costs "$2 per watt", but then he makes himself look like an idiot by saying that this is cheaper than solar. These price per watt figures are per watt under a given set of standard conditions (25C, 1000W/m^2, etc), and the standard conditions for solar are in no way related to whatever conditions he used for wind. Judging from his earlier experiments, probably a desk fan.
Basically, we don't have much to go on re. Windbelt apart from what Frayne has stated.
He even took it to the point of examining what happens when the terrorists from Earth blow up the link cable that connected the orbital portion, resulting in the elevator 'crashing' down to Mars. He even correctly showed how it would actually wrap around the planet (as opposed to falling straight) and when the final piece impacted it caused a huge crater from the sheer kinetic energy. (like a whip-lash).
Which is, of course, not what would happen. One, the cable must be *incredibly* lightweight per unit length for it to work out at all. Two, any unprotected structure like that would easily vaporize on reentry, even in Mars' tenuous atmosphere. Three, there would be no whiplash, as any unexpectedly strong downforce on the cable, such as "whipping", would simply snap it.
Wind has only become cost competitive in the last decade, so expecting it to make up 40% of anywhere's supply is just silly. You need to look at rate of growth of wind, and the rate of growth of wind is astronomical. Rate of growth of nuclear is negative. And it's not that nuclear is being somehow blocked by NIMBYs the nation over; it's that nuclear power, at least the current generation (there's some hope for next-gen) is just way too expensive per kilowatt hour.
I don't know what company your friend works for, but all I can say is that were I live, wind farms are popping up like weeds.
We're adding a percent or two *per year*. It's a rapid transition from "almost none" to "nearly as much as we get from nuclear". And it's at prices cheaper than nuclear. And we're only tapping the tiniest fraction of the available windpower here; the turbine farms are still few and far between.
Call it "supplemental" all you want, but here in Iowa, nuclear is supplemental, and wind is rapidly headed towards being a major portion of our supply.
Since when do you need to fast charge at home? Fast charging is only needed for while on the road. And yes, there are commercial fast chargers for those situations that are cost-competitive with gas station prices per-pump (I posted prices for them earlier in this thread). The bigger ones don't draw straight from the grid -- they use internal battery banks. The biggest ones I've seen are around 250kW.
Here's a starter on lithium reserves.
(My apologies for the
In case you're not good with math, 30,000,000,000 square meters divided by 1000 is 30,000,000 square meters. That's 11.5 square miles -- 3.4 miles on a side, not 45.
And, for your information, there are these things called rooftops...
Wouldn't trade it for, say, a Killacycle, with a 0-60 time of less than one second?
Oh really? They've never worked? Because here I am in a state with almost 8% of it's power from wind, approaching our share from nuclear (11%-ish). Wind should pass nuclear in the next five years or so up here. Just a couple years ago it was less than half as much as we got from nuclear. Better explain it to my utilities that what they're doing is impossible.
Wind in the great plains is actually cheaper than nuclear per kilowatt hour. It's almost cost-competitive with coal.