Korean boffins discover secret to quick-charge batteries South Korean boffins say they have found a way to cut battery charging times for electric cars from hours down to just minutes. The discovery changes the way materials used in regular batteries are treated, according to a Yonhap report. The report says researchers placed battery ingredients in a solution containing graphite …
It's all very well having batteries that can be charged in a minute but that assumes you have a mains source that can provide extremely high power levels. You're not going to get that in a domestic setting, so that rules out off-peak charging when energy is cheaper. I also doubt that there are many garages that would pay to have super high power cabling routed to their premises, at least initially.
Your domestic power supply is good for between 60 and 100kW. A domestic charger would therefore be able to charge an electric car in less than an hour while leaving capacity for other devices. In the US EV drivers tend to visit trailer parks to charge as they have high capacity power sockets available in this sort of capacity range.
Commercial power supplies can easily handle the load of charging multiple vehicles. Garages will install anything there is a profitable market for. As the price of petrol continues to increase demand for electric will also increase and a tipping point will be reached.
Erm!
That would be 60Amp for a normal house to 100Amp for a large house.
--FAIL--
To charge a car battery in minutes would need 10x this capacity.
Remember the power supply in this country only works because we do not all take the maximum capacity of our house at the same time. The average capacity of the distribution system for housing is only 2kW (might be slightly more or less depending where you are). The implied capacity to charge a car in minutes might be 600kW!
--FAIL--
@pklong:
you would need a machine to make the swap because of the weight and a second battery
Might depend on the car, but something not unlike a pallet lifter could well do the job.
BTW, are manufacturers sticking to a single bigass battery unit, or has someone figured that using multiple smaller ones (in series/parallel as needed) might be more versatile (same units in different cars, number of units varies with power requirements and available space), while also giving you economy of scale.
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3K in Italy is not really an issue... My mum lives there and there are not many more people more power hungry than that woman. She doesn't quite grasp the concept of saving energy, and if she finds a way I am sure she'll start inhaling the stuff while injecting herself with it! For some reason I can't understand she has a huge fridge and two fridge freezers. And she is not one to switch the telly off at night while she sleeps in front of it, or the aircon when there's nobody at home for a while. Never managed to educate her...
I am not sure how the average family could need more power than she does!
I really doubt that all the economic issues are because of the 3k limit at all.
And maybe there is something else to add to the list of things to tell a therapist once I finally decide to see one :)
standard 60-100A on 240V here in the UK = 14.4kW - 24kW max if my calculations are correct
BUT - see how the local substation gets on if everyone on the circuit starts using that at 6pm. My local friendly power distribution guru tells me they're rated to a much lower average load, hence the drive for smart meters that will help to distribute power more intelligently. (e.g. balancing a car that needs juice now against one that won't be used until 7am the following morning). Be prepared for higher unit prices for more watts!
I love the idea of all these batteries also being used to store energy- night power + wind/tide sources, and then selling back into the grid as the power is needed. Would reduce line loss too.
'Huge and inefficient' is a slight exaggeration, when you can get small and cheap power inverters that plug into your car 12v lighter socket that do exactly this. Okay, the batteries in question almost certainly won't have a p.d. of 12v, but I fail to see how the principle differs.
It's worth pointing out that there are ways of storing power from the grid to aggregate out peaks in demand over time, such as capacitors.
So if you really need to be able to charge in minutes at home, you would store power from the grid over several hours which would then be used to do the fast charging.
This would limit the transmission of very large currents to only the last few metres of cabling.
"Erm, batteries store power in DC form and the electricity grid is AC. You would need a huge inefficient DC to AC converter to send the electricity back to the grid."
That doesn't seem to have prevented householders up and down the country from installing solar panels on the roofs under the promise of selling power to the grid, breaking even financially after 50 years or something.
Strange. I don't see any British car manufacturers owning controlling interests in their US counterparts. Don't write-off a nation that has FIAT, multiple operational ship-yards, industrial machinery manufacturers, multiple fashion and design houses, and more. (Remember, Apple don't have the biggest market share in most of their markets, but they do rake in an awful lot of the profits. Margins are important and the fashion industry has some very, very fat margins.)
Italy has 3kW supplies (in rural areas; it's 6kW in most urban apartments) for the very simple reason that the country has very few natural resources for generating electricity itself. Almost all of Italy's energy needs are imported. Electricity is imported mainly from France, Switzerland and Austria. This is also one of the reasons why the country's economy struggles to grow even during the good times: fuel costs have a far greater effect on the costs of living than almost anything else.
Mario Monti is realising this and having to explain to his EU puppeteers why he can't achieve the impossible goals they've set him. Unlike the Brits, the Italians do save money for a rainy day and there's not much consumer debt. Most of the debt is sovereign debt: Italy's government has to build and maintain infrastructure in a land with lots of mountains, three active volcanoes, plenty of earthquakes, and an ageing population. (Oh, yes, and there's a fair bit of corruption too, but it's not as if the UK is exactly short on corrupt bastards either. Italy's are just more photogenic.)
Incidentally, the UK is also a net importer of energy now. It used to export quite a bit, but the most easily accessible natural gas fields in the North Sea have been used up and the British are now reliant on imports.
Unlike the Italians, the Brits have been profligate with their energy for generations and it's going to be a big wrench when they face the brownouts and power cuts that their ageing power infrastructure is going to force on them. The country will lose over 25% of its generation capacity within a decade and there's no sign of any new stations being ready in time to replace them.
Part of the current crisis is that multiple problems are hitting at the same time, creating a runaway cascade effect. The banks failed to do their duty. Those failures have soaked up a lot of the cash governments had intended to use for other projects that would have helped grow their respective economies. With so little money now available to grease the economic machinery, we're getting multiple seizures as the machinery jams repeatedly.
There was insufficient redundancy and resilience designed into the system. The system is therefore tearing itself apart and what we're seeing are increasingly desperate measures to keep it from breaking down completely. People—particularly politicians—naturally resist change, so wholesale replacement of the system is never considered. Instead, it's endless patch and mend, resulting in increasing bloat and poor performance.
Sound familiar?
If you think Italy's economy is going to be "donkey powered" soon, perhaps you should consider the fact that Italians are much more self-sufficient than most Brits. They're already used to living a low-energy-consumption lifestyle. They were using low-power lighting long before the concept became fashionable elsewhere. Not because they wanted to, but because they had to. Theirs is an economy of "micro-businesses" (yes, that term really does exist); there are almost no chain stores here. It's all family businesses. Their High Streets still have traditional butchers, grocers, you name it.
They'll be picking themselves up far more quickly than the British will, because they won't have anywhere near as far to fall.
Ahhh, you know the FIAT acronym as well ! "Fehler In Allen Teilen" German for "All Parts Are Faulty" - I love Matchbox replicas of Fiats, because in the real world, the cars act like matches - not only the Ferrari's! Fiat Bravo's and Brava's seem to catch fire as easily as the old original Pandas.
I know, a bit off-topic, but I would not praise a country for having a junk-manufacturer like Fiat.
I'm pretty sure he was referring to average household grid capacity. Most houses don't draw anywhere near 2kW all the time, while their fuse boxes allow for more peak usage, especially if there are power hungry appliances.
The grid has to be projected for an average capacity - same as overprovisioning of data links to the local exchange. The projection allows for a certain number of homes drawing their maximum allowance, while being offset by the rest which stays below 2kW at the same time. If everyone drew whatever their fuse boxes allowed them, they'd find out where the local power transformer is really fast.
Due to the magic of statistics, a typical house is fused at 60A or 100A. That then feeds up to twenty trips rated to trip ant anything between 6A (lighting) 32A (general rings) or even more (power showers and cookers).
3KW is about 13A give or take. which is what sockets are rated at and plugs fused for
Its perfectly possible to blow a mains 60A or 100A fuse without overrating anything else at all, and I have in fact done it.
5 x 3KW electric kettles is enough to blow a 60A fuse.
Christ mate, I wouldn't go parading that infront of your peers. wtf is it? Looks like tweakys little brother or something. Why the hell do you need a fucking flashing kettle? Do you stand and watch it boil? Or do you get it out at christmas and strap it to your tree?
Aside from that, how can you ever apply the label of 'sylish' to a kettle? I bet you're one of those sorts who has a musical door bell aren't you?
;)
You seem to be forgetting that most people are at home for more than 1minute.... so slow charging at home isn't an issue, and the big petrol stations will gladly replace daily tankers with high power lines... cheaper to run!
So take 1 hr to charge your car at home but 2 Minutes in a petrol station, sounds fine to me!
"not going to get that in a domestic setting"
And you don't get fuel pumps that can give 50 l/min in a domestic setting either, but a visit to a garage that can do a complete battery recharge in a couple of minutes is a huge step forwards. The phrase "fill her up" can therefore continue to be used well into the future.
Not many people have underground tanks filled with petrol either but it doesn't impede the use of petrol engines. I assume such fast charging points would be arranged a bit like petrol stations are now. Maybe some garages will even offer both fuelling systems (paying appropriate attention to safety I hope). Domestic chargers would be trickle charge variety where they can charge overnight.
To charge a 100Kwh battery in say 2 minutes would take 3MW peak flows.
To charge say 10 cars on a big forecourt would be 30MW peak flows.
2000 'filling stations' that big could, in a rush hour, absorb the entire existing UK grid.
More likely is that most people would 'off peak' charge at home or in slow charge stations at the roadside or designated car parks at 10KW rates.
Or if the greens get their way, spend te entire summer charging up enough for just one winter trip to the shops.
There are already proposals to make it mandatory to have 'black boxes' on cars that will report how many miles you drive. The info will then be used to send you a tax bill based on the number of miles you drove. Everyone will pay that tax. Gas/diesel vehicles will still pay fuel taxes. Those with electric vehicles will still have the regular electricity usage tax on their electric bills.The governments consider us nothing but slaves. We should send them all of our incomes and they will decide what we are allowed to do or to have
You're ignoring the need of a vast, new transmission infrastructure to distribute that amount of power to "charging points", plus the need for power plant ungrades to handle the increased loads. Sure, it can be done, but at what cost? Theoretically, electric vehicles would reduce pollution, but the truth is it mainly shifts where the pollution is created, from individual cars to power plants. When you factor in the pollution created in building the new transmission lines and power plant upgrades, you don't really see a net improvement in the environment for centuries. By that time we may have evolved wings and be flying.
Most if not all domestic settings usually have 240V available, even in the good ol USA with your freaky 110V system you have 220v for some appliances right?.
In the UK of course, every household is 240V and usually has a 100amp supply, that'll give you a decent speed charge...
BUT most home users will charge slowly at a cheap night rate, and just because it CAN charge fast, doesn't mean you MUST charge fast..
the FAST charge is needed for 'electric stations' where now we stop and refill on petrol, in the future we'll stop and recharge...
THAT is the best thing about this breakthrough!
Yeah, you can get 220 here by combining both phases coming into each house.
There is some really wacky math here with people saying that houses get only 2 or 3 kilowatts to work with. The pole out in my alley has a 22kw transformer on it (it's written on the side in big letters), and I can trace the wires to my house and a neighbor's only, so it looks like we could grab 10kw continuously without blowing anything up. In the middle of the night when not much is running, I think you could charge these batteries pretty quick.
Stop trolling electric car articles because the usage pattern isn't perfect yet. This is a damn amazing improvement if it proves to be practical, and with wide use, the price will go WAY down.
You are completely missing the rest of the transmission network. Your tranformer is tapped into the same transmission lines as many other transformers. You are all sharing the same power carried on the transmission lines from the power plant. Simply take the total number of users/houses/businesses/schools/etc. being served and divide it by the total amount of power being generated, and you will get the small numbers being reported. As long as we don't all try to use a great deal of power at once, it works. If many people tried to quick-charge their car at the same time, it won't work. In many places, if more that 40% of the people turn on their air conditioners, the grid fails. We are all on a 'shared network'.
A typical garage has a 440V 3-phase supply at 100A, enough to run the lights, pumps, the till, the coffee machine, the hot-air blowers in the toilets, the carwash out back and a bit in reserve. That's 3 x 240V x 100A, about 70kW or enough power to charge a single electric car from near-empty to full in about 50 minutes or so, assuming everything else is switched off during the charge cycle.
A five-minute charger for a 60kWhr battery pack will need to deliver 700kW; at 400V, the typical voltage for most car batteries, that's 1700A. The cables alone would be spectacular and the contacts in the connectors would have to be something really special.
Folks don't realise how much energy there is in liquid fuels like petrol compared to batteries.
Interestingly, I went back in time to 1905 and attended a public debate on the introduction of motor-cars to our roads.
It was funny because there was a gentleman there who said: 'It's all very well having a fuel tank that can be refueled in a minute, but that assumes that you have big storage tanks that can hold all that petrol. You're not going to find that in a domestic setting. I doubt that many coaching inns that would pay to have these expensive fireproof tanks installed on their premises either, at least initially'
And yet, here we are....
However, electric cars were around before diesel and later petrol cars were invented. People did charge their cars at home, and an 8 hour charge would get them a 20-30 mile range. A couple of litres of peanut oil, which isn't that flammable, would give them a similar range, and the car could potentially carry a lot more than that. That is why the internal combustion engine became a popular choice to power cars.
Re the 1905 comment. An electric car make as much sense as a gasoline-powered horse. If people could only duplicate what could be done with a single horse, we would still be riding on real horses. There would be no new infrastructure simply to replace a horse. Now if the innovation could replace a great many horses with one 'contraption', then you have something. If it can go faster, further, and carry more than horses, you have something. What can an electric vehicle do that a gas/diesel vehicle can not?
ie. the type of stuff that normally accompanies these "breakthroughs":
*Batteries will make production sometime in the next 40 years
*Batteries will cost 10x that of conventional batteries
*Batteries are unable to be mass produced
For the time being I'm in the "meh" camp on this one - too many times have we been told to get excited about the new amazing battery tech about to be released only for it to disappear into the dark abyss of the internet cache files & forum archives...
As noted in the article, there are *many* issues facing battery tech as a replacement for petrol engines in cars, charge time being just one - and the industry is still undecided on the best way to tackle the issue ("quick change" battery packs? high voltage home charge stations? changes to the batteries for quicker charge, but with higher prices?) let alone whether battery power is worth pursuing at all (hydrogen has one big issue, storage, but once solved is abundant, refill times are close to conventional fossil fuels, and it can be integrated into existing infrastructure).
Hydrogen can be used, together with carbon (liberated from CO2, for example) to create those luvverly hydrocarbons with their high energy-density, for which the infrastructure is utterly available without any modifications. What you need for this, beside the actual ingredients, is energy.
From the look of it ( damn paywall...:( ) they've managed to find a way to vastly improve surface area in the battery itself, which should also mean a superior discharge rate as well. barring heat effects and other sundries.
Maybe something in between a battery and a supercapacitor? That would indeed give possibilities as a "secondary battery" either in full electric or hybrid systems. This may turn out the be really interesting.
As far as "extremely high power levels" is concerned as mr. Boyce mentioned.... Ever looked, and I mean *looked* at the power consumption of an electric stove at full burn?
It's easy enough to build a charger that can handle that power, and it wouldn't even need changing your electrical infrastructure in the home.
Hell you can even make it "smart" and check for load, so you can plug in and cook your meal without blowing your fuses, and fire up to full load when you're asleep. The shortened charge time would mean you'd have full charge well before you'd get up again the next morning.
If this thing is actually viable, the rest of the engineering is *easy* .
Maybe something in between a battery and a supercapacitor? That would indeed give possibilities as a "secondary battery" either in full electric or hybrid systems. This may turn out the be really interesting.
One might call it a "buffer" battery, to put it in IT terms. I like the idea of being able to have power bursts available while the main battery can be designed with other desirable qualities in mind.
<blockquote>As far as "extremely high power levels" is concerned as mr. Boyce mentioned.... Ever looked, and I mean *looked* at the power consumption of an electric stove at full burn?</blockquote>
Modern electric showers consume even more than cookers nowadays. A quick survey would suggest 10.8kW is the highest available.
Also, most modern house supplies (UK) are fused at 80Amps which would suggest 19kW is available.
Would this also mean that things like regeneative breaking are able to put more back into the battery?
I am not sure (read that as not read up on) if there were limitations before but could this offer improvements to other aspects of an electric car like breaking as mentioned?
I love the clueless people downvoting mips.
Think of it like broadband FTTC. Sure the cabinet has 80Mb sat there all nice and pretty. Then 100 local houses sit on the network all night solid (downloading perfectly legal torrents and or linux distributions or possibly flash updates). I wonder how much of that pipe you will see, probably a lot less than the 40mb you were sold on.
The same goes for electricity. Sure you can load your small house with 60A and possibly even for 5 hours whilst charging your car overnight. Again get 100 people in your local area/street to do exactly the same and i'll bet brownouts start occurring. Or the substation goes pop.
Mips was saying 2kw is the AVERAGE loading when the nat grid calculates housing requirements.
Good point! Regen braking would capture far more energy with these batteries.
In the 1970s I converted a knackered old Karmann Ghia to electric power, using a surplus 120v aircraft generator/motor and 10 automotive lead-acid batteries. It had regenerative braking (in addition to the usual kind) recharging the batteries. However, as automobile batteries are not designed for fast charge/discharge cycles, dumping hundreds of amps into them brought them to a boil right smartly. The auto constantly smelled of acid and the batteries failed within a few months.
These new batteries likely could absorb the power but they would also require a bit of cooling.
> Standard in Germany is 3 Phase a´ 63A for a one family house.
> When the standard in UK is one phase, that would mean you have to run a 10mm² wire to your electric cooker
> and a least 16mm² to your fast water heater. Do i understand that right?
The key word in this part of the discussion that everyone is missing is "diversity" it is "diversity" (or in internet access terms, "contention") that allows individual ratings to total more than the supply is capable of delivering. I'm not sure if 2kW allowance per household is still the case in the UK - I suspect that it is a bit higher than that now, but it is certainly not the 20-odd kW per house that houses with 100A main fuses *could* suck because it is pointless putting that sort of infrastructure in when it will *never* be used.
Standard cable for a cooker (oven, 4 rings, attached socket) in this country is 6mm² which is protected with a 32A MCB (7.3kW @ 230V). It is assumed that everything is thermostatically controlled (so switches on and off all the time) and is not turned on at exactly the same time. Diversity allows 5A for an attached "13A" socket. A 32A MCB will take *minutes* to trip at a small overload - I don't have the tables to hand, but I think it is something like 5 minutes at 36A. Under some circumstances normal 6mm² "twin and earth" can be used under a 40A MCB, which deals with nearly all cookers, and for the others yes, 10mm² would be used.
"Fast water heaters" are not common in this country. Most people will heat domestic hot water using gas or another burnable fuel, and those that don't will use one or possibly two 3kW immersion heaters in the cylinder (ignoring solar).
Showers up to 7kW (not common these days) are wired in 6mm² cable while other showers (11.5kW is not uncommon) use 10mm². Diversity does not apply to "instantaneous water heaters". However, my advice (when I used to do the electricianing) was always that electric showers should be the last resort. If you have a cylinder full of hot water, use that instead. If you have a "combi" boiler it will be rated at 24kW or more - it will be able to heat at least twice as much water as an electric shower, and more cheaply as gas is *still* about a quarter the price of electricity per kWh delivered.
To other commentators - UK houses are almost without exception single phase 230V. Older premises have a 60A "service cutout" (main fuse that belongs to the supply company), a few are 80A and most modern houses (since the late 1980s probably) are 100A. All modern switchgear assumes 100A and more than 100A single phase is not (as far as I'm aware) available domestically. You would certainly have trouble finding a domestic consumer unit ("fuseboard") with more than a 100A main switch and 100A-rated busbars.
M.
High discharge rates are not a problem.
Model aircraft boys will fully discharge a battery in less than 3 minutes achieving power density figures similar to a jet engine on afterburn. I think I calculated the limit several years ago for the entire airframe and power train at something like 500W/per lb. Compared with say a Spitfire which flew at about 120W/lb.
What that means in car terms is something like 1500bhp per ton of car. That is formula one power levels. though sadly only for 3 minutes.
Even if the boffins solution really works, it will make little difference to the problem of fast charging. All it will do is to push the problem further down (or up) the line. The electrical equivlent of filling your tank with petrol, is in the order of megawatts. To get electrical charge rates anywhere neat this, is near impossible, not only from the equipment point of view, but from the effects of the wildly changing loads on the supply network.
Only if you insist on giving full charge to your battery in the same time as it takes you to fill a tank with gas, which is , frankly, comparing apples and pears.
The trick is to make charge times short enough to make both (slow) home-charging, and (fast) exchange-depot charging a viable option on a large scale, at which point you *can* create the power infrastructure needed, and "topping up" becomes as fast as filling your tank now, since you'll simply exchange the battery pack, and let the station do the loading.
A fast loading time for an exchange station is crucial, since the faster the cells load, the less buffer battery packs a station needs, which vastly reduces overhead and costs.
Absolutely true. A ' petrol' station would be a major substation with an appallingly high peak load - this is electric train territory in terms of the numbers.
It IS doable, but not simply or easily or cheaply. BUT the flip side is it is not actually that necessary. Most people doing - say - a supermarket trip would park up at tescos, and plug in, for a one hour charge or equivalent. Or go to the office car park and charge there, or at a municipal lampost overnight.
With a tankful of electricity being somewhere in the £5-£20 mark* you might as well keep it 'topped up'
Only people doing long runs on a motorway need that 5 minute flat to full charge.
*until the government realises its losing all its tax revenue
Would be nice if Dr Cho perhaps stopped touting new features of his amazing battery tech and focus more on building it?
In 2008 he was already claiming a breakthrough in energy storage with this graphene tech, applied for patents and said commercial production would follow in 4 to 5 years.
The only change so far however seems to be that he moved to another university.
...and 5pm on Friday. Everyone hops in their electric cars for the drive home.
5:30, the grid goes down, as 100,000 cars plug in for a fast charge at home.
The grind stays down all weekend, while EDF spend the 48 hrs replacing all the overheads which have all melted.
In other news: The UK's reported electric consumption and CO2 production met targets in 2020, because everyone now walks to work. In the dark.
This is really interesting news, it was only a couple of days back, that I read that battery technology was the slowest developing with very little change in the technology since the 1960s... The idea of fast charging, long lasting lithium ion batteries is brilliant...
However, I would have thought that he last place to use these would be in personal transport.
What is "green" about using a fuel that is produced miles away, and loses strength the further it travels from its source? Surely it is better to buy gas (petrol/diesel/lpg) in a filling station, and wait until electricity can be reliably generated in the car, which of course the Toyota Pious does quite well.
Nope. Not even close, if by "direct mechanical drive" you mean internal combustion firing pistons to move a crankshaft.
Electric motor is typically about 80% efficient. Obviously there are other losses generating the electricity from ??? in the first place, plus losses distributing that to the battery, but that's a different issue, as is the energy required to refine oil to petrol and drive it about the country in tankers.
Internal combustion engine is about 20% efficient.
See http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/evtech.shtml, http://www.stanford.edu/group/greendorm/participate/cee124/TeslaReading.pdf or just google "electric motor efficiency".
You're right, but that isn't what we're talking about. The OP (09:28) was saying that ships and locos use diesel-electric drive (an on-board diesel generator powering electricity motors) for efficiency. They don't - they use it because a direct mechanical drive would break under the stress, this is particularly true for rail locos where gearing is needed. A direct mechanical link from the engine to the wheels/propeller would be significantly more efficient, eliminating the conversion losses involved, and some high-power diesel locos use hydraulic transmission (similar to an automatic gearbox in a car) but this is mechanically challenging and therefore more expensive to maintain.
I notice people didn't like that... Well to make things worse those same people aren't going to like this:
In addition to those previous comments, I do not think that it is a good idea to hand total control of the production and distribution of auto fuel (or any other type) to a single central authority like government or giant corporate. If I have to rely on the national grid for my transport fix and suddenly one day, that grid runs dry...
Sounds unlikely, but by 2015 we will not be permitted to run coal powered stations (without paying a huge fine), we won't have the benefit of most of the remaining nuke plants (maybe Sizewell B), we will still be deeply prejudiced against shale gas, and (as nobody has ever predicted :) ) the wind turbine contribution will still be in the less than 10s of percents, the French will be at their limits as to what they can ship to us from their nuke plants... and our lights will start to go out.
And you people think that it is a good idea to convert to cars that run on fuel delivered in this way????
So, assuming every car moves to batteries, we will need:
- massive increases in electricity generation. Bearing in mind this is already an issue, whacking cars on top is a problem. Solution - build nukes....
- batteries. These are going to be needed continually in massive numbers (complex lithium ion at that). How much energy and resources does it take to make and ship these? What is the environmental impact of making them?
- home transformers or stations. We'll need lots (good job opportunities...), as, even with rapid charging, the range of most vehicles still suck. Trains work by pulling power externally - battery cars can't really do this.
Forgive my cynicism, but I don't think we're there yet. Hydrogen might be an option, but battery cars? Not so sure.
What's that got to do with the price of a pound of bananas?
Apart of course from the fact that we generate electricity and run internal combustion engines with it...
The point is this... Every time you convert energy into another form, some gets converted into something that we currently have no use for... We call it waste. There is less waste produced from an engine that burns the oil directly... If they one day find a way of compressing and storing extracted hydrogen efficiently, cheaply and safely, we will probably have a good replacement for the current internal combustion engine, the compressed hydrogen being burned to drive a turbine of course.
Not quite.
Yes, we have losses at every transformation of energy. But there is one thing You forgot to consider: efficiency.
You see, a petrol car engine is uses about 20% of the fuel energy - the rest is waste.
BUT (there is always a "but"...) A stationary generator is much more efficient, close to 50%. Mind, I am not talking about a 2kW portable generator. I am talking about huge thermoelectric stations.
Yes, You may be right, regardless. I didn't run the numbers, so even with this difference the petrol car MAY be more efficient. But the math is not so straightforward...
"I do not think that it is a good idea to hand total control of the production and distribution of auto fuel (or any other type) to a single central authority like government or giant corporate."
News just in - probably too late to be worrying about that. Saudi Aramco are the world's largest company, they control a significant amount of the oil market. They are the giantest of the giant corporates. Personally I'd rather be in thrall to the French or Norwegians for electricity than to the House of Saud for oil.
It is the fast DISCHARGE of the battery. In the event of a short circuit they tend to explode rather than just catch fire. This coupled with normal protection mechanisms not working in those circumstances (too slow) can really put a downer on someones day (life).
But hey, a short circuit can't happen in a car crash.... oh wait.
I can change the battery in my torch in about 2 seconds and get the old ones on to recharge.
Now if we have standard sized batteries we could just swap them out and then the garage can recharge the old one at leisure. Or you can charge it in situ yourself overnight.
OK that would take simple standards but the car industry seems to be able to make cars with or without curved bits though queueing at iGarages might be seem as a cool thing to do.
Let's say the problem of quick recharging is close to be solved. The other big problems with electro-chemical batteries are:
a) their capacity changes with outside temperature and age
b) the charge is lost faster or slower depending on their age and (daily) temperature cycles, in a couple of days you may remain with 5-10% of it.
So you charge it one evening (or night) at -10Celsius, and you actually pour less in it than at +20Celsius. You leave it for a week, the charge may be gone. One would say no big deal, but this is now, before the price of electricity goes up many times. Who pays for that? And you may not be able to recharge it every night.
Right now I can fill the tank and the gas (petrol) is still there the next couple of days (minus some evaporation) and I can still use it for the weekend.
Electric cars may be good for some people in California, or Spain, not so much in cold, humid places... and yet in California or Spain or Greece they may need air conditioning, again from batteries.
Not good in Winnipeg, or Melbourne, or Petersburg,
I worked in designing electric cars, and there is still a lot of work before we have something as real life convenient as the actual thermal engines.
...Me again. Where the electric solution seems to work is in some hybrid cars, where they actually have an "electric flywheel" to store braking energy. Some locomotives also use supercapacitors and it seems to save some energy, it's a good beginning.
On the other hand, I was reading that Prius has an excellent aerodynamic (something like Cd=0.25 says wikipedia) so they did everithing they could to reduce mechanical losses and improve range.
I see that houeses in the UK have huge power allowances!!
Here in Spain, i have 20A, at 220v (soon to be 230v) = 4400W, 4,4KW. This is normal for a modern, air conditioned flat (85m2).
My brother has a house, and double the power: 8,8 KW.
Worst of all: here in Spain, you PAY for rated power!! in my case, I pay 6 pounds a month for the "privilege". Having double the power almost triples the cost.
As for distributing so much power in such short time, the solution is clear: Do not use 240volts.. use (as an example) 1000volts, and assume 5 minutes to charge the battery from 20% to 100% (batteries are not going to be flat!!).
Look here: http://www.destockable.fr/index.php/amperage-section-monophase
You will need arround 12 CM cables.( and they don't need to be solid inside!!) Add insulation and you will havo to reconsider: better insulation and 4000volts, or 10 minutes, that will get you 6cm cables, we can ive with that.
As for peak power ussage, it won't be that big. Not at all, and it would be smaller if you use higher intensity (you can google it).
Would power grids and stations need to be upgraded? OF COURSE. But that is no problem, we will be switching from petrol based products to a mix of uranium, coal, wind, etc.
Note: my car runs on gas (LPG). It takes some 4-5 mins to fill the tank, and I have almost no problem with that.
As for from self discharge, my understanding is that the problem has more to do with the separator.. at least in NiMh batteries.. so no problem here.
But, just imagine that they improve the batteries so they are 95% efficient at charging. And you charge the 60Kw battery in 10 minutes (remember, you just charge 40KW, it isn't empty).
You would get the heat of a 120KW heater. This is: FIRE!! Your car would be in flames in a blink of an eye.. ant the solution could be to add a high destilled water recirculation hose to cool the car battery. A bit dangerous...
And, as for the carbon circuits, carbon conductors burn out over time, as owners of petrol cars that have carbon spark cables know... (or should know).
Aitor 1, I missed that consideration of fire. You're right. So even the idea of slowly charging a stationary battery in charger in order to speed charge the mobile battery in the vehicle is unworkable due to excess heat (even in Northern Canada in winter).
I'm certain this article is based on bogus PR crap aimed at luring in retail investors for something that is a great idea for $30 laptop batteries, but completely unworkable for $9,000 vehicle batteries.
I told a mate of my idea to have thousands of small batteries in parallel, charged through an array of diodes, and discharged in series, and he said it had already been thought of. This must have been 1984-ish.
However the problem comes when you try to charge them. Where do you find a power supply to provide the current, and how do you get rid of the heat?
There' nothing new in this Edison was doing the same thing with his Nickel-Iron batteries before 1900. He had somewhat the same problem, of getting the charge into and out of his batteries. he solved by adding incredibly small, thin flakes of nickel to the mix. One thing that didn't come out in the article, was that the same factor is of consequence in discharge as well as charge. It has the opportunity to tun a short circuit, internal or external to turn an innstant melt down to bomb proportions.
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Me thinks the press release was written to target investors ignorant of all things electric.
For any given voltage, to go from 60 A over 8 hours to 1 hour means 480 A.
In North America a 240V 200 A service panel is the largest in common use for homes, with 240V 100A being the most common.
I do not think there is even a standard wiring for 480A at 120 or 240V even in commercial installations, I think you have to go to a higher voltage and step it down so you have manageable size wires.
So you'll need voltages coming into the building at something well over 240V, 7,000V is common.
To be practical you'd need to store the charge in batteries in the vehicle charger over (say) 8 hours, and then charge the vehicle by dumping the stored charge in the charger into the vehicle.
So 2 sets of fancy expensive batteries.
But still, this will be good for charging laptops, telephones, remote controls and other small devices.
By North American safety standards, at 7,000V you must keep yourself 2m (6ft) from surfaces at that voltage. That means tools with 3m (9ft) fiberglass handles, rubber gloves and rubber boots, and a pass mark on exam given at the completion of the safety course.
There are exceptions allowing 1m clearance, but that is another longer course, and only for emergencies and requires considerable approvals. Plugging your car in is not an emergency.
That most people will be able to charge their car at home.
A huge number of city dwellers can't. Not without rigging some kind of power cord over the pavement.
Electric filling stations are a requirement for mass acceptance where elecetric vehicles are needed most (urban areas) and if we're going to have to refuel more often it'd better be faster and more convenient to do than it is now. (I can see charging points being common in carparks and I can also see vandals taking great delight in messing up cables/sockets)
Of course, if the smart self-driving vehicle comes to pass then I'll happily settle for JohnnyCab and let it sort its fuelling out on its own.
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