Today's lithium batteries can be charged to 80% in less than 20 minutes (a normal road trip pit stop)--no matter how big they are--and this will only improve. All we need is the network of DC Quick Charge stations. Building out quick-charge infrastructure is orders of magnitude cheaper than building a hydrogen distribution system. Tesla is already doing it (with their "Supercharger" network), and cost is such a non-issue that they provide it as a free perk for their drivers. With their included solar panels selling back power when not in use, the installations virtually pay for themselves.
But if this is still a problem for you, get a range-extended electric vehicle like the Chevy Volt. Your daily commute will still be cheap, low-emissions electric driving, but you always have the option of driving continuously on the gas generator. It's unreasonable to expect society to build out hydrogen infrastructure when it's really just a stopgap until we have better batteries--400 mile range and 10-minute quick-charge time are not that far off. The long-haul trucking industry will come up with their own solution to fuel and carbon prices, but their needs don't have to dictate what daily commuters use.
Single-wheel motors will be even smaller than the central motors used in most cars now. When you consider that the Model S has two watermelon-sized motors to power the whole car, there really won't be that much extra unsprung weight after you take out the drive shafts. The handling will be phenomenally improved by having perfectly distributed torque that you won't even notice the suspension change.
Putting some aluminum plates in a bucket of acid is a lot simpler than an internal combustion engine. No moving parts, no maintenance (even when you're not using it), no exhaust or emissions to regulate. People take gas engines for granted, but the honest truth is that they are ridiculously overcomplicated if all you want it to get from point A to point B. Electric motors win every time, so long as you can give them enough electrons.
Actually, only chips made using processes on the order of 50-200nm are really susceptible (my numbers may be off, but I know the idea is right). When you get them small enough, down to 45nm, 32nm, 28nm etc the chips and transistors are so small that the probability of a charged particle actually hitting a transistor becomes almost negligible. Once we start actually flying those modern processes, dealing with radiation will become much easier. I don't know how much if any the magnetic transistors will be able to improve upon this.
Like I said, "protected" cells are nothing more than an "unprotected" cell in a box with a protection circuit. There is nothing magical about them, and nothing inherently better about them besides the reduced possibility for assembly error.
Per-cell protection circuits become impossible when the pack voltage and/or current exceeds that which can be safely switched by small semiconductors or self-resetting thermal (PTC) fuses. Plus, per-cell protection circuits can malfunction just as easily as per-pack circuits, and can be harder to diagnose and repair. So claiming that Boeing's problems would be magically fixed by "protected" cells ignores the constraints imposed by their design requirements.
Umm, what? The batteries DO have "on-board" controllers--how much more on-board can you get than putting them in the same box? It's not like you can fuse protection circuits into the lithium cells themselves, and a properly designed BMS supporting multiple cells is no different than strapping individual BMS's on each cell, and likely weighs less. It *should* be impossible to damage the battery, but it obviously *wasn't*, so now they have to take apart the box to see which part failed.
Metric is better not because of some terribly intrinsic quality but because it's everyone else uses it. That's the whole point of a standard--cnce a unit system becomes standard, it is no longer arbitrary. Metric was invented by scientists to do physical calculations more easily, and everyone else changed to match them because there wasn't any point in maintaining separate standards for science or engineering or everyday life.
There are benefits for the engineers and technicians who design and build machinery. Not having to convert units every time you get a drawing from a supplier overseas. Not having to re-train employees to work on a foreign-market version of your product. Not having to plan ahead to make sure your domestic foreign suppliers are using the same units, or pay extra for one of them to use one system or the other. Not having to stock your machine shop with two complete sets of tools, and waste mental effort switching back and forth, because half the stuff you do is in metric anyways.
Then there are the ancillary benefits, like not having our citizens look like complete idiots when they try to read roadsigns in kilometers in Europe. Or the ridiculousness of having to divide by 5,280 feet to get miles, or how our roadsigns say "1/2 mile" and then "1500 feet" (0.284 miles).
Sure, we run our CAD programs in imperial, but guess what? That Chinese fab house rounds all your drill sizes to the nearest 0.1 mm, and that 1/16" board is probably only 1.5mm. And any machine shop worth its salt has a full set of tools in both imperial and metric, because anything we import is metric and they have to make compatible parts. I'm pretty sure at least foreign makes of cars use all metric parts even when assembling in the US, so they are compatible with the rest of the supply chain--it is U.S. makes that suffer by requiring "special" parts, or metric-imperial adapters and crap, unless they switched already too (ha!). It ought to be an obvious business decision even without government intervention, but there is just too much inertia for everyone to switch unless they do it at the same time.
The *complete absence* of solid rocket boosters in SpaceX's plans is a direct result of research done to achieve the Shuttle program. No way in hell were they going through that ordeal again.
How exactly is a lifetime of being treated as a leper proper punishment for drunken public urination? The problem is not that the treatment is inappropriate for some individuals based on their past crimes, but that many people are put on these all-powerful lists who really shouldn't be, given the consequences.
It's not sexy, but a lot of the technological advancement of NASA missions comes from optics and detector technology. Cameras used in rovers and satellites today have orders of magnitude more pixels than anything they imagined in in the 80's. And it's not just advances in civilian CMOS technology being transferred over: researchers at NASA are constantly improving detectors over the entire electromagnetic spectrum, including infrared, ultraviolet, gamma rays, X-rays, all the time making our science results more and more accurate and insightful. The gravitational mapping of the moon is only possible because the two GRAIL probes use laser interferometry to fly in formation--kilometers apart, but accurate to within micrometers. The number of cameras on each Mars rover doubles or triples with each generation. The James Webb Space Telescope is going to get into orbit and unfold like a freaking transformer robot; and use not one, but 16 mirrors, all flexing separately to autonomously focus a huge image of the cosmos. Sure, it's mostly incremental improvements, but what we're doing today was considered a pipe dream even 10 or 20 years ago.
But you're right--if we took all the money from the Iraq war and threw it at high technology research, we would probably have a moon colony by now. As it is, we have to make all the incremental projects fit within whatever pot scrapings Congress throws at us, so we're slowly accumulating the bits and pieces of tech we'll need to make something truly ambitious a success, if we ever get the money and the mandate to put it together.
Censorship doesn't stop much of anything--it only stops people from talking about things where you can see them. In terms of totalitarian utilitarianism, a police surveillance state is much more effective than blunt force marshal law.
Then the problem is your local politicians and/or voters who don't have the guts to properly fund their recycling program. It's their own fault for creating a negative incentive against efficiency and environmental protection. I'm glad my locality doesn't have that problem.
It's also the government that has to clean up the land fills and ground water when they get sued for letting people dump so much mercury into them. So their only failure is in not educating the public and not providing better recycling facilities. Also, it's the local governments that have to deal with these problems, while the federal government is the one mandating CFL use.
He also has great faith in the ability of the new bulbs to last. He says he has one in his lab that has been working for about a decade.
Which of course doesn't mention the stability of the light output over time or the similarity of this one to the production model, but it's at least theoretically possible.
No, charging speed is not the real issue, and here's why:
One, when battery improvements let the average car's range go past 120 miles per charge, the vast majority of daily trips and commutes can be done on a single charge, only needing to charge overnight.
Two, charging speed is fundamentally linked to battery capacity. If the capacity increases, so does the charging speed. So a larger battery can be charged at a higher miles-per-hour rate even though it still takes the same 6 hours to go from empty to full.
Three, cars like the 2012 Nissan Leaf have an undersized 3.3kW charger (~10 miles per hour). The batteries will support higher rates, and the 2013 model will have a faster 6.6kW charger (~20 miles per hour). The batteries could likely support even more, but charging stations with a >7kW electrical service are rare, outside of the 20-minute fast chargers. So it's actually not the batteries limiting the recharge rate so much as the rest of the design of the car/thermal systems.
The fact that gasoline cars have a typical efficiency of ~15%, while electric cars exceed 80%, means the real competition is 6.9MJ/kg versus 1.44MJ/kg. The 5x improvement requirement was obviously intended to match the effective density of gasoline.
The real problem is the myth that every person in the country needs a car that can drive halfway across it in a single day. We are all stuck with the lowest common denominator, so everyone who DOESN'T need that particular feature ends up polluting way more than necessary. Gasoline may have higher energy densities today, but it also has the most inefficiency, pollution, greenhouse gases, noise, fire hazards, and price volatility of any available (vehicle) fuel. And that's without mentioning the fact that the performance of gas engines is *terrible* when compared to properly sized electric motors. Just look at the Tesla Model S--dead silent, no emissions, priced competitively with gas cars in its class, and does 0-60 in under 4 seconds.
If this lab can achieve their target, we will drop gas cars in a heartbeat and our carbon emissions will plummet. It's an absolutely crucial piece of the global warming puzzle, which is why it deserves the attention of an Apollo-style research blitz.
At the higher frequencies like 1.3GHz (LTE), the wavelengths are so small that the corresponding antenna features are also very small. They have to be extremely precise if you want the gain to actually be at the right frequency, and even then it usually takes some trial and error. Do you have a chemical or laser PCB etching machine, and a cellular antenna analyzer (Saw one SUPER cheap on ebay for $300 once). Otherwise, just making random things could result in reflections damaging your transmitter. This isn't like putting together a 1/4-wave dipole on 2 meters.
But you could try fashioning a parabolic reflector dish and put your existing antenna in the center of it. I've heard of people doing that with cell phones and wi-fi adapters before.
Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot that solar panels don't work near the poles of the planet, through no fault of either the panels or the regulations. Guess you'll have to build some more nuclear power plants then. But the other posters are right, 14c/KWH is not an unreasonable price for sustainably-produced power. Maybe you're spoiled with low rural rates (or alternatively, non-deregulated electricity markets), but I'm paying 12c/KWH where I live on the USA east coast.
Admittedly, this applies more to the lower latitudes, but a power company in southern California did a study to see whether paying consumers "retail" for the power they generated (by rolling the meter backwards) was actually fair, or if they were over-paying. After weighing all the factors, the buy-back rate they came up with was actually *more* than the retail rate for electricity. There were so many operational benefits to having distributed generation, like less load on the grid during peak times, less need to build more plants or bring extra capacity online, etc, that it actually made sense to credit the solar owners more per kWh than they were paying the utility. Maybe this won't be the case where you live, and maybe this doesn't take into account all the installation costs, but it sure seems like a smart investment in the long term for a lot of people in the world. (Sorry I couldn't find the link at the moment.)
The Volt battery pack is 40 miles because that's more than 75% of Americans drive on an average day, so GM sized it to keep costs down. I know that's true for me (I've been tracking my daily miles for almost a year now). Not sure where you're getting your numbers, but the battery volume is MUCH greater in the top-end Model S than it is in the Volt. The Volt has a 10kWh battery, while the Model S has an 80kWh battery, so the Model S get 250-300 miles on a charge instead of 35-50. The Model S is actually less efficient, possibly thanks to its weight, but has enough capacity to make up for it. Plus, weight isn't as much of an issue for electric cars as gas because regenerative braking recaptures some of that extra kinetic energy when you stop.
But I'm with you on you decision to not buy a Volt--I don't want my EV to go anywhere near a gas station. That's why I'm waiting for the 2013 LEAF to come out this spring.
39% of electric vehicles have solar panels on their home, so they generate their own power (at least on average). And it would take an extraordinarily sudden leap in EV use for off-peak EV charging to be more load than daytime peak usage--both are expected to climb over time, and more capacity is needed regardless of EV adoption. They will just make the load more constant, which is *better* from the power company's perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
Today's lithium batteries can be charged to 80% in less than 20 minutes (a normal road trip pit stop)--no matter how big they are--and this will only improve. All we need is the network of DC Quick Charge stations. Building out quick-charge infrastructure is orders of magnitude cheaper than building a hydrogen distribution system. Tesla is already doing it (with their "Supercharger" network), and cost is such a non-issue that they provide it as a free perk for their drivers. With their included solar panels selling back power when not in use, the installations virtually pay for themselves. But if this is still a problem for you, get a range-extended electric vehicle like the Chevy Volt. Your daily commute will still be cheap, low-emissions electric driving, but you always have the option of driving continuously on the gas generator. It's unreasonable to expect society to build out hydrogen infrastructure when it's really just a stopgap until we have better batteries--400 mile range and 10-minute quick-charge time are not that far off. The long-haul trucking industry will come up with their own solution to fuel and carbon prices, but their needs don't have to dictate what daily commuters use.
Single-wheel motors will be even smaller than the central motors used in most cars now. When you consider that the Model S has two watermelon-sized motors to power the whole car, there really won't be that much extra unsprung weight after you take out the drive shafts. The handling will be phenomenally improved by having perfectly distributed torque that you won't even notice the suspension change.
By and large, the U.S. power grid is in a very good position to support the adoption of electric vehicles while still reducing emissions. This can not be said about some places, such as India and China, whose power plants are more dirty than gasoline cars.
Putting some aluminum plates in a bucket of acid is a lot simpler than an internal combustion engine. No moving parts, no maintenance (even when you're not using it), no exhaust or emissions to regulate. People take gas engines for granted, but the honest truth is that they are ridiculously overcomplicated if all you want it to get from point A to point B. Electric motors win every time, so long as you can give them enough electrons.
Actually, only chips made using processes on the order of 50-200nm are really susceptible (my numbers may be off, but I know the idea is right). When you get them small enough, down to 45nm, 32nm, 28nm etc the chips and transistors are so small that the probability of a charged particle actually hitting a transistor becomes almost negligible. Once we start actually flying those modern processes, dealing with radiation will become much easier. I don't know how much if any the magnetic transistors will be able to improve upon this.
Like I said, "protected" cells are nothing more than an "unprotected" cell in a box with a protection circuit . There is nothing magical about them, and nothing inherently better about them besides the reduced possibility for assembly error.
Per-cell protection circuits become impossible when the pack voltage and/or current exceeds that which can be safely switched by small semiconductors or self-resetting thermal (PTC) fuses. Plus, per-cell protection circuits can malfunction just as easily as per-pack circuits, and can be harder to diagnose and repair. So claiming that Boeing's problems would be magically fixed by "protected" cells ignores the constraints imposed by their design requirements.
Umm, what? The batteries DO have "on-board" controllers--how much more on-board can you get than putting them in the same box? It's not like you can fuse protection circuits into the lithium cells themselves, and a properly designed BMS supporting multiple cells is no different than strapping individual BMS's on each cell, and likely weighs less. It *should* be impossible to damage the battery, but it obviously *wasn't*, so now they have to take apart the box to see which part failed.
Metric is better not because of some terribly intrinsic quality but because it's everyone else uses it. That's the whole point of a standard--cnce a unit system becomes standard, it is no longer arbitrary. Metric was invented by scientists to do physical calculations more easily, and everyone else changed to match them because there wasn't any point in maintaining separate standards for science or engineering or everyday life.
There are benefits for the engineers and technicians who design and build machinery. Not having to convert units every time you get a drawing from a supplier overseas. Not having to re-train employees to work on a foreign-market version of your product. Not having to plan ahead to make sure your domestic foreign suppliers are using the same units, or pay extra for one of them to use one system or the other. Not having to stock your machine shop with two complete sets of tools, and waste mental effort switching back and forth, because half the stuff you do is in metric anyways.
Then there are the ancillary benefits, like not having our citizens look like complete idiots when they try to read roadsigns in kilometers in Europe. Or the ridiculousness of having to divide by 5,280 feet to get miles, or how our roadsigns say "1/2 mile" and then "1500 feet" (0.284 miles).
Alaska is too bigger than Europe! It says so right there on my Mercator projection map!
Sure, we run our CAD programs in imperial, but guess what? That Chinese fab house rounds all your drill sizes to the nearest 0.1 mm, and that 1/16" board is probably only 1.5mm. And any machine shop worth its salt has a full set of tools in both imperial and metric, because anything we import is metric and they have to make compatible parts. I'm pretty sure at least foreign makes of cars use all metric parts even when assembling in the US, so they are compatible with the rest of the supply chain--it is U.S. makes that suffer by requiring "special" parts, or metric-imperial adapters and crap, unless they switched already too (ha!). It ought to be an obvious business decision even without government intervention, but there is just too much inertia for everyone to switch unless they do it at the same time.
The *complete absence* of solid rocket boosters in SpaceX's plans is a direct result of research done to achieve the Shuttle program. No way in hell were they going through that ordeal again.
How exactly is a lifetime of being treated as a leper proper punishment for drunken public urination? The problem is not that the treatment is inappropriate for some individuals based on their past crimes, but that many people are put on these all-powerful lists who really shouldn't be, given the consequences.
It's not sexy, but a lot of the technological advancement of NASA missions comes from optics and detector technology. Cameras used in rovers and satellites today have orders of magnitude more pixels than anything they imagined in in the 80's. And it's not just advances in civilian CMOS technology being transferred over: researchers at NASA are constantly improving detectors over the entire electromagnetic spectrum, including infrared, ultraviolet, gamma rays, X-rays, all the time making our science results more and more accurate and insightful. The gravitational mapping of the moon is only possible because the two GRAIL probes use laser interferometry to fly in formation--kilometers apart, but accurate to within micrometers. The number of cameras on each Mars rover doubles or triples with each generation. The James Webb Space Telescope is going to get into orbit and unfold like a freaking transformer robot; and use not one, but 16 mirrors, all flexing separately to autonomously focus a huge image of the cosmos. Sure, it's mostly incremental improvements, but what we're doing today was considered a pipe dream even 10 or 20 years ago.
But you're right--if we took all the money from the Iraq war and threw it at high technology research, we would probably have a moon colony by now. As it is, we have to make all the incremental projects fit within whatever pot scrapings Congress throws at us, so we're slowly accumulating the bits and pieces of tech we'll need to make something truly ambitious a success, if we ever get the money and the mandate to put it together.
Censorship doesn't stop much of anything--it only stops people from talking about things where you can see them. In terms of totalitarian utilitarianism, a police surveillance state is much more effective than blunt force marshal law.
Then the problem is your local politicians and/or voters who don't have the guts to properly fund their recycling program. It's their own fault for creating a negative incentive against efficiency and environmental protection. I'm glad my locality doesn't have that problem.
It's also the government that has to clean up the land fills and ground water when they get sued for letting people dump so much mercury into them. So their only failure is in not educating the public and not providing better recycling facilities. Also, it's the local governments that have to deal with these problems, while the federal government is the one mandating CFL use.
Last sentence of TFA:
He also has great faith in the ability of the new bulbs to last. He says he has one in his lab that has been working for about a decade.
Which of course doesn't mention the stability of the light output over time or the similarity of this one to the production model, but it's at least theoretically possible.
No, charging speed is not the real issue, and here's why:
One, when battery improvements let the average car's range go past 120 miles per charge, the vast majority of daily trips and commutes can be done on a single charge, only needing to charge overnight.
Two, charging speed is fundamentally linked to battery capacity. If the capacity increases, so does the charging speed. So a larger battery can be charged at a higher miles-per-hour rate even though it still takes the same 6 hours to go from empty to full.
Three, cars like the 2012 Nissan Leaf have an undersized 3.3kW charger (~10 miles per hour). The batteries will support higher rates, and the 2013 model will have a faster 6.6kW charger (~20 miles per hour). The batteries could likely support even more, but charging stations with a >7kW electrical service are rare, outside of the 20-minute fast chargers. So it's actually not the batteries limiting the recharge rate so much as the rest of the design of the car/thermal systems.
The fact that gasoline cars have a typical efficiency of ~15%, while electric cars exceed 80%, means the real competition is 6.9MJ/kg versus 1.44MJ/kg. The 5x improvement requirement was obviously intended to match the effective density of gasoline.
The real problem is the myth that every person in the country needs a car that can drive halfway across it in a single day. We are all stuck with the lowest common denominator, so everyone who DOESN'T need that particular feature ends up polluting way more than necessary. Gasoline may have higher energy densities today, but it also has the most inefficiency, pollution, greenhouse gases, noise, fire hazards, and price volatility of any available (vehicle) fuel. And that's without mentioning the fact that the performance of gas engines is *terrible* when compared to properly sized electric motors. Just look at the Tesla Model S--dead silent, no emissions, priced competitively with gas cars in its class, and does 0-60 in under 4 seconds.
If this lab can achieve their target, we will drop gas cars in a heartbeat and our carbon emissions will plummet. It's an absolutely crucial piece of the global warming puzzle, which is why it deserves the attention of an Apollo-style research blitz.
At the higher frequencies like 1.3GHz (LTE), the wavelengths are so small that the corresponding antenna features are also very small. They have to be extremely precise if you want the gain to actually be at the right frequency, and even then it usually takes some trial and error. Do you have a chemical or laser PCB etching machine, and a cellular antenna analyzer (Saw one SUPER cheap on ebay for $300 once). Otherwise, just making random things could result in reflections damaging your transmitter. This isn't like putting together a 1/4-wave dipole on 2 meters.
But you could try fashioning a parabolic reflector dish and put your existing antenna in the center of it. I've heard of people doing that with cell phones and wi-fi adapters before.
You don't even need to take the battery out of the car to use it in an emergency, if you don't mind bolting a few cables under the hood. A 24kWh Nissan LEAF can power a refrigerator for 3 days. http://www.wusa9.com/Sandy/article/227657/474/Charge-It-One-Mans-Solution-To-Power-Outage
They finished encrypting all the laptops at my center earlier this year. I was also amazed to learn that headquarters is behind the curve.
Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot that solar panels don't work near the poles of the planet, through no fault of either the panels or the regulations. Guess you'll have to build some more nuclear power plants then. But the other posters are right, 14c/KWH is not an unreasonable price for sustainably-produced power. Maybe you're spoiled with low rural rates (or alternatively, non-deregulated electricity markets), but I'm paying 12c/KWH where I live on the USA east coast.
Admittedly, this applies more to the lower latitudes, but a power company in southern California did a study to see whether paying consumers "retail" for the power they generated (by rolling the meter backwards) was actually fair, or if they were over-paying. After weighing all the factors, the buy-back rate they came up with was actually *more* than the retail rate for electricity. There were so many operational benefits to having distributed generation, like less load on the grid during peak times, less need to build more plants or bring extra capacity online, etc, that it actually made sense to credit the solar owners more per kWh than they were paying the utility. Maybe this won't be the case where you live, and maybe this doesn't take into account all the installation costs, but it sure seems like a smart investment in the long term for a lot of people in the world. (Sorry I couldn't find the link at the moment.)
The Volt battery pack is 40 miles because that's more than 75% of Americans drive on an average day, so GM sized it to keep costs down. I know that's true for me (I've been tracking my daily miles for almost a year now). Not sure where you're getting your numbers, but the battery volume is MUCH greater in the top-end Model S than it is in the Volt. The Volt has a 10kWh battery, while the Model S has an 80kWh battery, so the Model S get 250-300 miles on a charge instead of 35-50. The Model S is actually less efficient, possibly thanks to its weight, but has enough capacity to make up for it. Plus, weight isn't as much of an issue for electric cars as gas because regenerative braking recaptures some of that extra kinetic energy when you stop.
But I'm with you on you decision to not buy a Volt--I don't want my EV to go anywhere near a gas station. That's why I'm waiting for the 2013 LEAF to come out this spring.
39% of electric vehicles have solar panels on their home, so they generate their own power (at least on average). And it would take an extraordinarily sudden leap in EV use for off-peak EV charging to be more load than daytime peak usage--both are expected to climb over time, and more capacity is needed regardless of EV adoption. They will just make the load more constant, which is *better* from the power company's perspective.