Charge in 5 minutes, Drive 500 miles?

ctroutwi writes "In the wake of rising gasoline costs there have been plenty of alternatives seen on the horizon. Including Hybrids, Biofuels, fuel cells and battery powered all electric cars. CNN has recently posted a story about a company (EEStor) that plans on offering Ultra-Capacitor storage products. The claim being that you charge the ultra-capacitor in 5 minutes, with approximately 9$ (~$.45 a gallon) of electricity and then drive 500 miles."

daddypants email link broken?

I emailed the on-duty editor (regarding this being a dupe), like any good little /. subscriber. Unfortunately my e-mail bounced pretty much immediately. Normally I would resist the temptation to join in the /. circle-jerk that is shouting "OMG DUPE DUPE DUPE!!" but I wanted someone (ScuttleMonkey, etc) to note that the 'daddypants' email link is bouncing.
( ERROR: Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at... Line 126 ) ..ScuttleMonkey, if you want the full error, feel free to let me know where to e-mail it.

On a sidenote, what seems odd to me is that not only is this a dupe that is currently visible on the index [slashdot.org] of slashdot, but that the article summary is almost identical to the earlier submission, and is even from the same submitter. Insert Matrix deja-vu quote here.

Mods, try to be on the lookout for copy and paste karma whores (man, plagiarism annoys me). Unfortunately with 700+ comments on the last discussion, this may not be easy, haha.

Re:daddypants email link broken?

Just to clarify.....

I emailed the on-duty editor (regarding this being a dupe), like any good little /. subscriber. Unfortunately my e-mail bounced pretty much immediately. Normally I would resist the temptation to join in the /. circle-jerk that is shouting "OMG DUPE DUPE DUPE!!" but I wanted someone (ScuttleMonkey, etc) to note that the 'daddypants' email link is bouncing.
( ERROR: Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at... Line 126 ) ..ScuttleMonkey, if you want the full error, feel free to let me know where to e-mail it.

On a sidenote, what seems odd to me is that not only is this a dupe that is currently visible on the index [slashdot.org] of slashdot, but that the article summary is almost identical to the earlier submission, and is even from the same submitter. Insert Matrix deja-vu quote here.

;-]

Sorry couldn't resist

Jaj

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Neo: Whoa. Deja vu.
Trinity: What did you just say?
Neo: Nothing. Just had a little deja vu.
Trinity: What happened? What did you see?
Neo: A Slashdot article was on the index, and then I saw another that looked just like it.
Trinity: How much like it? Was it t

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Boniface: Good evening. Tonight on "It's the Mind", we examine the phenomenon of déjà vu. That strange feeling we sometimes get that we've lived through something before, that what is happening now has already happened. Tonight on "It's the Mind"

But to be fair...

But to be fair, is it just me or have they been doing a lot better lately? Certainly I've noticed fewer, and I've appreciated it.

I know it's more fun to bitch about people, but you ought to hand out some kudos every once in a while too. We could do with a

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Doing the bare minimum at your job is not a praiseable accomplishment.

Improvement is.

If you emit nothing but negative feedback, if even improvement is met with negative feedback because the improvement doesn't make it to "perfection" or some other standard

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I still have several gallons of electricity from before the y2k scare. They're stocked up in a storage closet in the basement. Luckily, I bought it at $.27/gallon before the price was driven up.

Hmmm... I wonder what the shelf life of a gallon of electrici

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Meh, they serve as many ads to people ranting about the dupe as they do to people reading the original. It's all good.

Don't go China

I just hope they don't farm out making the batteries to the same company that makes them for Apple and Dell. A tank full of combustible liquide seems good compared to that.

Energy density

This time around I have thought of something to say.

As we strive for higher energy density in our laptop computers, electric cars, mobile phones, etc; we are creating devices which can potentially release much of their stored energy in a short space of time. It doesn't have to be a chemical explosion. I have in my workshop a melted bicycle tail light and four cooked NiCD batteries from cycle commuting years past when I put two batteries in the wrong way and created a short circuit.

So IMHO battery/capacitor explosions are the way of the future, certainly much more than the backyard LPG explosions we get from time to time here in Australia (LPG is a cheap substitute for petrol, but a bit volatile.)

How is Alan Cox going with his hair? Is it growing back yet.

Batteries and such

How long until they're bought out and run to ground ? Last time we had a chance at EV cars, GM bought controlling share of the batterie technology and used their Delco crap. The higher performance batteries never really made it in the cars, just a few got the first line issues. And when GM got out of the EV business, they sold that controlling share to Texaco/Mobile, or was it exxon ? They want us to go Hydrogen and Biodeiesel next. The Electric car won't see the light of day until the Big Oil Profiteers get UberUber Mega Rich... Sad that we let them supplant technology and lie to us... Watch the film "Who killed the Electric car"...and the rest.. Cheers

It wasn't me!!!

well... I thought it was an interesting article when I posted it the first (and only) time yesterday... However, I had nothing to do with the encore!!!... This is only the 2nd story I've ever submitted, and the only one to ever get accepted... (albeit twice)..

Those figures do make sense

I meant to write this the first time the article appeared :-) I had originally thought that it wasn't going to work out; but getting to the end, it turned out they did. Oh well - now I've done it, you might be interested... for your viewing pleasure...

Supposition: 500 miles on a 5 minute charge, with $9 worth of electricity.

$9 worth of electricity = 100kWh
100kWh = 360 megajoules
500 miles = 804 kilometres

Force = Energy / distance
    = 360e6 / 804e3
    = 447 Newtons

(of course the above is only the average force available for that journey)

F_drag = 1/2 * Drag_Coefficient * Cross_Section * AirDensity * Velocity^2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_coefficient [wikipedia.org] gives Drag as around 0.3 for an average car. Cross-section is probably about 3 square metres.

F_drag = 0.5 * 0.3 * 3 * 1.29 * v^2
    = 0.581 v^2

55 mph = 24 m/s

F_drag_55 = 334 Newtons

Which is well within the average 447 available; and gives scope for losses. So; it turns out it's not crazy to suggest you can get 500 miles on $9 worth of electricity.

I wonder how far my house would travel a month...

More details..

There are some good details on this technology on Energy blog

http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2006/01/ eestor_ultracap.html [typepad.com]

A breif run down:

• It is a parallel plate capacitor with barium titanate as the dielectric.
• It claims that it can make a battery at half the cost per kilowatt-hour and one-tenth the weight of lead-acid batteries.
• As of last year selling price would start at $3,200 and fall to $2,100 in high-volume production
• The product weighs 400 pounds and delivers 52 kilowatt-hours.
• The batteries fully charge in minutes as opposed to hours.
• The EEStor technology has been tested up to a million cycles with no material degradation compared to lead acid batteries that optimistically have 500 to 700 recharge cycles,
• Because it's a solid state battery rather than a chemical battery, such being the case for lithium ion technology, there would be no overheating and thus safety concerns with using it in a vehicle.
• With volume manufacturing it's expected to be cost-competitive with lead-acid technology.
• As of last year, EEStor planned to build its own assembly line to prove the battery can work and then license the technology to manufacturers for volume production
• EEStor's technology could be used in more than low-speed electric vehicles. The company envisions using it for full-speed pure electric vehicles, hybrid-electrics (including plug-ins), military applications, backup power and even large-scale utility storage for intermittent renewable power sources such as wind and solar.
• They have an exclusive agreement with Feel Good Cars, a Canadian manufacturer of the ZENN, a low speed electric car, to to purchase high-power-density ceramic ultra capacitors called Electrical Storage Units (ESU). FGC's exclusive worldwide right is for all personal transportation uses under 15 KW drive systems (equivalent to 100 peak horse power) and for vehicles with a curb weight of under 1200 kilograms not including batteries.

-S

OK, but...

...now that you've explained how many gallons of electricity it is, could also please give us the equivalent Libraries of Congress of electricity? It seems useful somehow. ;-)

Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/ [digitalelite.com]

Re:How Much Does the Capacitor Cost?

Also, I doubt they're hooking it to a regular outlet if they're getting $9 of electricity out of it in five minutes. Granted, you could make charge stations that are similar to gas stations (or add them to gas stations) but you really should list all the materials we would need when considering the cost of this alternative.

You mean like the "electrical energy stations" mentioned in TFA, from which a 5 minute charge may be obtained?

An 18 ton capacitor? Yeah, it would cost a bit

Here's some hard data: these things are low voltage devices. E.g., Maxwell's data says 2.7V for theirs. They also have crap power density: 3-5 Wh/kg. (Yes, I didn't miss a "k" there.) They may have high capacity, but Q = C*V, so low voltage still puts a limit on it.

So if you want to store about 90 kWh in a bank of those, you'd need anywhwere between 18,000 and 30,000 kg worth of ultra-capacitors. Yes, between 18 and 30 metric _tons_. Not quite a commuter car, you know? I'll also go on a limb and say that buying whole tons of them will cost a pretty penny.

Also, transferring 90 kWh in 5 minutes means 1080kW power. More that 1 MW. So, yeah, I don't think your average power socket can do that. At 2.7V that means 400,000 A, too.

So, basically, it's just snake oil. It ranks up there with the promises to make energy out of water by changing the orbits of electrons in hydrogen. Some fraudster figured that he can get tens of millions of dollars VC to pretend to make such a thing. And given the IQ of some VC these days, they probably will too.

It's a capacitor

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck... I don't know about you, but my guess would be that maybe it's not a fish. In this case, if it "acts like a capacitor", then it _is_ a capacitor.

In fact, if you RTFP (Read The F***ing Patent), it _is_ a fanc

Re:Regular house current (FYI)

try running a basically closed loop 220V, 30amp connection for 5 mintues

220V * 30amp = 6,600 watts * 5 minutes = 0.55 kilowatt hours. You're only a few orders of magnitude off from "$9 worth of electricity", specifically 52 kWhs for EEStor's product. To charge 52 kWhs in 5 minutes, you'd need to be chugging through ~600 kW of power, or about 2.7 kiloamps at 220V.

Bye, bye wall plug.

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A good way to mitigate this surge in power demand at home, it would be smarter to have an equivalent capcitor sit at home and charge over the course of an hour or two and then unload it's charge to the vehicule's capacitor.
With this method you could even s

Re:Regular house current (FYI)

Of course, they could use larger versions of the capacitors at the fueling station to store a "charge" of 52 kWhs. 52kWhs * 3.6 MJoules = 187.2 MJ. The vehicle gets pulled into a stall, the driver gets out, large copper or gold rods drop from the ceiling into sockets which are directly connected to the capacitor. You have a bank of capacitors which switch on in succession, ramping up current (this minimizes switching problems, since 2700A is not fun to switch) with some type of diode in the middle to prevent back flow. In 5 minutes, the car is charged. Meanwhile the capacitors are recharging from mains current. Green light comes on, next car comes in. To make it work, you'd need something a little beefier than a 220 home circuit, possibly a 12.5kV line which is pretty common in commercial areas. You could probably do at least one car at a time, more if you could increase the charging capacitor capacity (which would be fully charged overnight or during off-peak times).

As far as costs, of course the cost of electricity is going to go up for everyone. However, with transmission lines, you build them (once) and then the power keeps coming. So after the initial investment, you are going to save money over gas. Gas has to be brought in by truck, which costs money in labor and fuel and truck insurance, etc. Then you have pump maintenance, etc which is no longer necessary. On the other end you have a regional distributor who takes a cut, a refiner who takes a cut, a global distributer who takes a cut of the crude oil, and then a producer who takes a cut. Not to mention the people doing the transporting between each of these middle-men.

With electric, you are going to cut out a lot of middle men. The utility, if fossil powered, will buy in large bulk quanities that will be delivered to one location, probably by ship. So, just by moving energy by transmission line we are cutting back on the total energy use required by the country. It's all a big chain reaction.

I hope they can make this thing work.

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Slashdot editorial operations is a good old boy buddy system. I've been with this site since it was .org, and I remember the fuss when people's postings were DELETED because they indicated shall we say "room for improvement" with the site.

Editors used to h

Metric system

Ah, yes, the metric shitload. Much easier to work with than our antiquated American shitloads, based upon (but not matching) the old British shitloads...

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Why does everyone get all stuck on what it would take to charge it? That's the easy part. What we are missing for electric cars is exactly this type of storage. Cost was never a problem (except for replacement, which this fixes). The issue was weight,

DON'T MOD PARENT UP!!!

No offence Insipid, but the irony is just too damn sweet.

In an discussion under a duped article we have a post that refers to Deja Vu that was modded Redundant! It doesn't get better than this folks!