Nanotech Anode Promises 10X Battery Life 193
UNIMurph sends word out of Stanford University that researchers have discovered a way to increase battery life tenfold by using silicon nanowires. Quoting News.com: 'It's not a small improvement,' [lead researcher Yi] Cui said. 'It's a revolutionary development.' Citing a research paper they wrote, published in Nature Nanotechnology, Cui said the increased battery capacity was made possible though a new type of anode that utilizes silicon nanowires. Traditional lithium ion batteries use graphite as the anode. This limits the amount of lithium — which holds the charge — that can be held in the anode, and it therefore limits battery life... 'We are working on scaling up and evaluating the cost of our technology,' Cui said. 'There are no roadblocks for either of these.'"
Good deal (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Good deal (Score:5, Informative)
No , please, stop right there. Here, let me put it into perspective for you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:World_energy_usage_width_chart.svg [wikipedia.org]
For those too lazy to follow the link.
World energy consumption:
Oil: 37%
Coal: 25%
Gas: 23%
Nuclear: 6%
Biomass: 4%
Hydro: 3%
Solar heat: 0.5%
Wind: 0.3%
Geothermal: 0.2%
Biofuels: 0.2%
Photovoltaics: 0.02%
WORLDWIDE photovoltaic production is about 13GW. A single nuclear reactor or coal fired powerplant can produce 1-2 GW. Solar couldn't even power a tiny european country with populations of a few millions. Let alone China, India, the US, Russia etc
The most probable ways to reduce CO2 emissions from our energy generation are:
-Carbon capture and storage
-Expanding Nuclear power
-Increased use of Gas in place of Coal ( gas contains a lot of hydrogen and hence emits less CO2 per kwH than does coal ).
Ironically these are all measures which are fiercely opposed by Greenpeace et al, who instead want us to hope that wind and solar will save the day. At present production wind, solar and solar heat taken together produce about 0.82% of worldwide energy. To avoid a 2 C increase in global average temperature we need substantial cuts in CO2 emissions before 2050. Does anybody SERIOUSLY believe that photovoltaic / wind is up to the job?
I mean for the love of god, electric cars are great in that they could let us use Nuclear power or plants equipped with carbon capture technology, but they will not be solar powered. Not within the foreseeable future at least.
Re:Good deal (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's look at Nanosolar as an example. Their first plant, when at full capacity, will make them one of the biggest solar producers in the world (430 MW/year if I recall correctly). But this is just their first plant. Selling cells that are profitable at $1/W at nearly $5/W means they'll be profiting hand over fist, which means that investors will fight for the chance to throw money at them. How long do you think it'll take them to scale up with essentially unlimited venture capital? I'm betting not very long. They built their current facility with $100M raised just a year and a half ago, and they've already delivered their first product. Given that most of that money had to go toward simply commercializing their laboratory-scale process, what sort of capacity do you think they could pull off with, say, the next $1B in cash? Dozens of GW/year? And Nanosolar is just one CIGS manufacturer among many. And there's CdTe, too. Unmet demand begs for a market solution. It's inevitable that it's going to be filled.
Longer term, here's a crazy new tech for you to chew on: nanoantenna solar cells [inl.gov]. A completely different process than conventional cells, which use photons to knock electrons off a donor, these new cells are simply designed to receive solar energy in the same way that a larger antenna receives the several-orders-of-magnitude-longer wave radio signals. They should be able to be produced on a cheap reel-to-reel process like CIGS cells, yet they have the potential to be as much as 80% efficient, even receiving the infrared that the Earth emits at night.
Re:Good deal (Score:5, Informative)
First of all, Nanosolar HOPES to make the cells at $1/W, they are nowhere near that cheap yet, and this is the price their marketing department HOPES to achieve. Secondly, that is the price for the cells without factoring in energy storage devices, energy conversion systems, servicing etc
With most of nuclear reactors built in the west ending their licensing in about 2030 - 2040, Oil running low and gas prices rising due to low demand, it seems likely that nations will turn to coal. This effectively implies you will either have to do carbon capture and storage or start building nuclear plants very soon unless you want to have your greenhouse gas emissions rocket due to massive deployments of coal plants. To think that solar will replace Coal, Oil, Gas AND nuclear within 30-40 years amidst the east rapidly increasing the energy intensity of their economies, is wishful thinking at best.
But no, we're going to gamble on some hypothetical solar breakthrough. Despite the fact that no realistic way to overcome the problems with intermittent supply, that they don't produce energy at night, diffuse and limited output, as well as the high price, having been demonstrated. If you think the press release about what one heavily subsidized solar company "hopes to achieve" negates any of my arguments, then I'd say you are naive at best.
As for nano-antenna solar cells, again, you are talking several decades of development at the very least. They won't save us from the energy gap that is likely to occur within 20-30 years, and they only deal with the costs incurred by the cells themselves, they don't address the cost of storing and converting the energy.
Re:Good deal (Score:5, Insightful)
And your information comes from? Nowhere, that's where, because they're not sold on the open market yet, so claims like "they are nowhere near that cheap yet" are complete BS. All of their capacity is currently going to a German municipal plant. Secondly, all of the CIGS companies are giving numbers in the same ballpark, as are the CdTe companies.
Secondly, that is the price for the cells without factoring in energy storage devices, energy conversion systems, servicing etc
Duh. That's part of a general solar economics calculation. Only an idiot would just multiply $1/W times the desired number of watts. A large, batteryless installation in Anchorage, AK of nanosolar cells gets a 30 year IRR of 7-8% [daughtersoftiresias.org]. In Las Vegas, it's more like 13-14%.
Thirdly, it is the price under optimal conditions, with perfectly aligned cells. (and on, and on...)
(Dragnet theme)Duh, duh duh duh. Duh, duh duh duh, duh!(/Dragnet theme)
Do you think we're idiots? What's next? "Third, the cells only produce power when the sun is visible. Fourth, you need to have wires to conduct the power. Fifth, you need "humans", who can use the power...."
They are also relying on indium, an element which is thought to become scarce due to increasing demand, and of course, mass-deployment of indium based solar cells would certainly push the price up.
Indium is more common than silver, is easier to recover than silver (because of its close interrelationship with zinc ores), and CIGS cells use a miniscule amount of it (nanoscale-thickness coatings). Indium's current high price is more related to a lack of demand for it before LCD TVs started using it in bulk; this led to a few of the world's only indium recovery circuits shutting down without new circuits replacing them at other mines. It's not a problem [indium.com]. It only takes a few years to ramp up production.
Finally, even if they were able to start producing these at competitive costs and at a large rate, you still have the problem that you will have to increase solar photovoltaic output by a factor of 1000 just to reach 20% of current energy demand.
Huh? Did you ignore my post, above, where it already addressed this?
With most of nuclear reactors built in the west ending their licensing in about 2030 - 2040, Oil running low and gas prices rising due to low demand
Whaa? For one, nuclear is making a serious comeback in the US. Two, oil is not running low. Light sweet crude is, but light sweet crude != world petroleum production capability. Venezuelan super heavy crude and Canadian bitumen syncrude are taking off. Third, the demand for gasoline has been rising constantly year to year. Are you confusing the annual demand fluctuations with year to year growth in consumption? Demand is always lowest in the winter, highest in the summer.
[quote]But no, we're going to gamble on some hypothetical solar breakthrough.[/quote]
Hypothetical? Yeah, about two dozen companies, some of which have been selling them in smaller volume for years, is "hypothetical". What's next -- are CFLs hypothetical as well?
[quote]Despite the fact that no realistic way to overcome the problems with intermittent supply, that they don't produce energy at night, diffuse and limited output, as well as the high price, having been demonstrated.[/quote]
In the pacific northwest, and to a lesser degree the west coast as a whole, energy storage is a non-issue. The west relies a lot on hydro power, and hydro pairs perfectly with solar (it already has a low capacity factor, so there's no additional economic cost to the hydro producers). Even in the east, solar alone with no storage can eliminate the p
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On what exactly? Hot air?
We do not have very good ways of storing energy. Battery technology sucks balls, especially on industrial grade. Sure, you could use the energy to make methanol for example and burn that later but that's not terribly efficient process. Growin plants and all that. Hydrogen has a nasty habit of evaporating through solid
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Compressed air and/or pumped water storage. The prices I've seen listed are about 4c/kWh.
Have you factored in the costs of powering regions which do not get much sunlight during winter months and/or do not have sunny weather in general?
With $1/W solar cells, it doesn't really matter. I'm not sure you understand how cheap that is. Even solar power Alaska comes out cheaper than coal with $1/W cells.
You take a $/W number that everyone knows is unrealistic unless you've got orbital solar pane
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Fair enough. But again you're omitting some key facts, are you not?
To start on the water reservoir business, you have to put about a billion USD on the table and that's if you're building the damn thing in China dozen years ago!? The chinese plant [power-technology.com] has storage capacity of around 9300MWh (13000MWh gravity potential at 70% efficiency). That takes 8 million cubic meters of water pumped 600 meters up. Or about 200m by 40m by
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Re:Good deal (Score:5, Informative)
Minor information injection here:
Nanosolar _is_ making solar 'sheets' now... no wishful thinking involved.
They've contracted with a German company who has ordered roughly 600 megawatts worth of sheets
The sheets will be mounted in panels in a factory near Berlin, and used in Germany, which because of favorable laws requiring utilities to buy back power from customers, is experiencing a HUGE demand for renewable energy sources for the homeowner.
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Do you have a reference for this? It is very interesting news.
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In any case this is incredibly good news. If they can make 430 MW of product per year at $4 million per MW from a $100 million dollar facility, that gives them well over $1 Billion per year to expand production. So in 2011 they may have 10 plants in full operation and another 100 under constructi
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True yes, but then again we don't use as much energy at night either! e.g. in the UK :
http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/Electricity/Data/Realtime/Demand/Demand8.htm [nationalgrid.com]
Actually
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To top it all off, consider where solar
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The IEA PV trends report from 2003 estimated 20% growth a year for the next decade, but has since been revised upwards. Current trend is looking more like 25% growth in area produced year, which gives somewhat more than that in power generated because average efficiencies
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Aww, no, see... I saw a chart just like the one you linked to from 1910, and the percentage of Nuclear power used in the world was 0%. By your logic, this means that Nuclear power is utterly impractical and won't be able to produce enough energy for a small country, much less the world.
Or did the fact that increasing the use of photovoltaics will consequently increase the percentages of photovoltaics on that chart escape you? What, exactly, did you think that that graph proved,
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The energy input required to make solar panels is one of the major concerns in th
Sony (Score:2, Funny)
You were beaten to it (Score:4, Funny)
After the event, there were several studies of what to do about it. One suggestion was to make available lithium batteries as an alternative. The cells proposed were really quite big. After a few interesting incidents in testing, one of which had an engineer cowering behind a filing cabinet screaming "get that wire away from that thing", one REME officer suggested that with a simple piece of spring loaded steel, the cells could find an alternative use as emergency grenade substitutes. (Disappointingly, the actual solution proposed was to fit an internal fuse.)
Given the energy density of this proposal, a simple micro-Sterling generator driven by sticks of dynamite might be safer in the briefcase.
*The Ministry of Defence is kind of like the Pentagon, but without the competence.
OK... (Score:4, Funny)
So quit with the jibber-jabber and make with the 50 hour laptop battery.
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There's TSA limits on the amount of lithium that can be in a battery. Using nanowires to hold more lithium will get you a bigger, yet far more dangerous battery you can't bring anywhere.
Its not so good in cars either, given how dangerous lithium ion batteries are. I'd rather have a RTG or a box of dynamite in my car.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's 2008. We have extremely safe cars. We have practical, efficient nuclear fission (both for peaceful and weapons uses). We have the ability to store 1TB of data on a drive the size of a small cigar box. And don't forget that I can communicate from one side of the world to the other instantly either via fiber or satellite.
True, we don't have earth-shattering technologies occur overnight (you point this out as well, that research takes time). But if you've noticed, the pace of research and breakthroughs has been increasing over the last 30-40 years. Different technologies build on each other. Faster microprocessors allow us to build hybrid cards and space vehicles. Genetic engineering opens a whole new world in biology.
What I'm trying to get at is, don't be so pessimistic. This battery technology can and will be developed quickly. It's because we have few other practical options.
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But if you've noticed, the pace of research and breakthroughs has been increasing over the last 30-40 years. Different technologies build on each other. Faster microprocessors allow us to build hybrid cards and space vehicles. Genetic engineering opens a whole new world in biology.
Maybe the "problem" is that we've become so accustomed to rapid progress in science and engineering that we've started to take it for granted. Now, when advances occur as they do every day, they're more or less anticipated and thus capitalized into our expectations. The "wow" factor gets harder and harder to achieve, at least outside the immediate field where a breakthrough is made...
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Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Flying cars don't need flying drivers, they need driving pilots. There are about 650,000 pilots in the United States with a certificate of Private Pilot or better. (the minimum license necessary to take more than 1 passenger in a flying vehicle) Compared to the population of 300 MILLION people, and you find that there are an awful few people who could "drive" a flying car. You find the economics of scale that will work at this level. Certainly, Detroit won't. Flying isn't the same as driving. There are no roads, and you have to pay careful attention to long-established procedures designed to avoid situations like running out of gas. (a minor inconvenience in a car, potentially fatal in a plane if you aren't well trained to handle it) I hate to diss flying, since I'm a pilot by hobby, and I love my hobby. But the requirements to pilot are significantly greater than the requirements to drive.
Nuclear Fusion is widely available. Look up. (you have to go outside to see it - it's called the "sun") As a source for electricity, it's coming at prices comparable to coal [slashdot.org] which is the cheapest non-renewable form of energy today in the USA.
Data storages has generally followed Moore's law, with a doubling time of about 18 months. What more do you want? I remember when a 100 MB HDD was big. Now, a little over 2 decades later, I routinely transfer files bigger than that all around the world via the Internet, and save to a flash disk the size of my thumb that requires no external power source, while my LAPTOP hard disk is 2,500 MB in size. I won't highlight my workstation/home-server with > 3 TB of storage.
Amazing!
Try using a 10 year old computer sometime. You'll be amazed at just how far we've really come.
And, technology is advancing on ALL fronts.
I recently added on to my home, doubling its size. Along with that came new regulations for insulation, higher-efficiency heating/cooling unit, insulation, double-paned windows, etc. I DOUBLED the size of my home, but my heating/cooling bill is about HALF what it used to be. Progress? Suffice it to say that the money I'm saving on my utility bill easily beats the monthly cost of the financed retrofit upgrades to my original home! In other words: it would be cheaper to buy the upgrades to an existing 100 year old home to get these improvements than to keep using whatever you had in the first place.
I drive a 10 year-old Saturn. It gets 30 MPG fully loaded at 90 MPH, quietly, with air conditioning, decent radio, and air bags. Back in the 1980s, I drove a VW diesel Rabbit that did about the same at the same speed. It was noisy, shook lots, had an AM-only radio, and didn't have A/C. Relative prices (inflation adjusted) makes the Saturn CHEAPER than the VW Rabbit. Hello progress ?!?
I use CFL lights throughout my home. Over their lifetimes, they are cheaper than incandescents in replacement costs alone, and 5 of these things use less electricity than a SINGLE incandescent bulb. I can light up my whole house for what it used to cost to turn on the porch light. I've banished incandescents from my home. And, I'm still not particularly good at turning
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We're using old breakthroughs (Score:2)
Before I became a scientist and engineer myself I would have thought a couple years wou
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Given the cost of energy, do you really want to pay for the cost to fly a flying car? I don't think energy is going to get any cheaper over the next century. Just the gas to fly a single prop aircraft is $45/hr, not counting all the other maintenance costs, and the craft can only go about twice as fast as legal highway speed. Do you really want to deal with sky rage?
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Look some people want to hear what research is going on, what is at the cutting edge. These are things we don't hear about in the normal media. If you just want product deliveries, wait around for the Macworld or CES discussions.
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1. I would never have believed when I was at university exactly ten years ago, that in 2008, I would have a more powerful processor in my *telephone* than I had in my desktop computer I took to uni to study Computer Science with.
2. I would never have believed ten years ago that I could get 4 GIGABYTES of non-volatile memory in something the same size as my little fingernail (MicroSD) for a few pounds off eBay.
3. I also bet my
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I think the growth in computing power has remained fairly close to the mark though. Last review I saw for a Core 2 Duo had a benchm
some more (Score:2, Insightful)
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/19/169259 [slashdot.org]
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Why graphite? (Score:2)
Yea, I am starting to turn into a biochemistry hacker. Just imagine what my basement will smell like now...ha ha ha
could increase the availability of solar and wind (Score:2, Insightful)
Storing more danger? (Score:2)
This could get interesting later..
Interview with Dr. Cui (Score:3, Interesting)
Which Is It? (Score:2)
So which is it, life, or capacity? As I know those terms:
Life: the number of times the battery can be recharged to some approximation of its original capacity.
Capacity: The amount of energy, think amp/hours at the rated voltage, that the battery can deliver.
So does this battery provide 10X as many recharge cycles in service as normal batteries, or does it deliver 10X as much energy per volume or
The Slashdot summary and news.com are incorrect (Score:2, Interesting)
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I saw it
But clearly "they" did not see it, else "they" would not have submitted a dupe.
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you must be new here. Dupes are not just the editor's doing although the editors really should google things like this it is ultimately other slashdotters that vote stories like these up in the firehose. No matter how many dupes happen on slashdot, people still vote up duplicates of stories probably because 1) no one googles them and 2) a lot of our fellow slashdotters apparently don't visit the site enough to know a dupe like this one.
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=Smidge=
Re:Dupe (Score:5, Insightful)
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So, again, don't get all pedantic on others just because you can't think of the consequences of an action or choice.
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Re:Dupe (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Dupe (Score:5, Interesting)
As for lifespan, Yi Cui's team expects to be able to get at least 1,000 cycles out of this. That may not sound like much, but when you can go ~350 miles on a charge, that's 350,000 miles. And not like the battery just disintegrates up at the end of its lifespan; it simply doesn't hold as much charge.
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To be honest, that depends on what their marketing division means with a "cycle"...
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Also time shifted photovoltaic and wind power suddenly become much more viable. The problem with solar power is that we throw away much of the peak supply because we can't store it anywhere.
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Re:Dupe (Score:5, Interesting)
Stop and think for a second, or do some math, because electric cars will *never* 'fill up' as fast as a chemically powered car. Instead of pouring in gasoline, imagine that gasoline powering a flamethrower which you point into your gas tank, and you'll have a better grasp of what it means to transfer energy directly (as in electricity) versus high density potential (like gas).
Assume your electric car needs only 20 horsepower to maintain 60 mph.
One horsepower is about 750 watts, assuming perfect efficiency.
That's 15 kilowatts to keep the car going 60 mph.
To make the numbers easy, figure 300 mile range. That means you need to drive for 5 hours.
5 hours times 15 kilowatts is 75 kilowatt-hours.
Now let's assume the 'electric station' supplies electricity to charge your car at 500 volts.
75000 watt-hours divided by 500 volts equals 150 amps.
For an hour. Assuming perfect charging.
To get to a 3 minute charge time (one twentieth of an hour) you need 20x the amperage, or 3000 amps.
To carry 3000 amps of current for 3 minutes without melting insulation, my numbers show you'd need copper wire about 2.5 inches in diameter (and you'd still get a temperature rise of 90 degrees farenheit over ambient). And note to electricians who may think the numbers are off, don't forget you're charging with DC voltage, not AC, so you're gonna need about 5000 circular mils worth of wire.
I cannot imagine Joe Average plugging TWO wires, each of which is thicker than his wrist, into his car for a 3 minute recharge.
And yeah, you could drop it to 300 amps, but then you're talking 5000 volts.
So basically... you're never, ever going to see a 'gas station' for electric cars. They'll always be charged for long periods at home, or at 'charging garages'.
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Re:Dupe (Score:5, Insightful)
What about standard, pre-charged batteries that you simply swap at the "gas" station instead of really charging the car? This way the whole process can be done in the same amount of time than filling up gasoline.
This is not even to complicated. You more or less rent the battery from the respective company and return it when it's empty (just to exchange it for a fully charged one).
The "gas" station has all the time in the world to charge the empty batteries, replace/repair faulty ones, etc.
Isn't that a more logical (and much safer) solution to the problem?
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What is the total weight of the car batteries? How much energy will be spent physically swapping them? This isn't just a starter battery... If nothing else, this would probably be the end of the self-service gas station (at least until our car-refueling robot overlords sweep in to save the day)... And remember, it's the driver that's going to end up paying for any labor, or
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You have to look out for people trying to game the system. I'd run a battery in my commuter car for a few years, until it started to degrade. Then take it to a 'station' and swap it out for a good one. I'd keep 'filling up' until I got one that was practically new. Then I'd stop 'filling up' and charge my batteries at home.
Batteries are like propane tanks, that are emptied of it's contents, but the bottle remains unchanged.
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You buy a new car. With a new battery. With a range of 300 miles.
You use the car for a month, recharging at home.
You take a trip, and hit a 'swap station' on the way.
You get home with your 'new' battery, only to discover that your range has dropped to 150 miles, because the battery is a year and a half old and near the end of its useful life. Don't forget that lithium batteries only have a useful life of about 1.5 years.
Yeah, you could solve that problem by having
Re:Dupe (Score:5, Informative)
If you use 1000 V , 4 parallel plugs, a 100A charging current, that gives you 66kWh in 10 minutes. 100A is doable with AWG 1 ( 7.35mm ), and most of the time you wouldn't be charging from empty anyway, so something like 6 minutes is more reasonable. Of course, this is only necessary if you need to take a pit stop during a long journey, most people would probably just charge it at home over night.
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Yes, it is that far. Those people are insane. If you're commuting more than 20 miles a day, the problem isn't with your car, the problem is that your house is located too far away from your job. You need to move, or take a different job.
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If most people just charge their cars at home over night, then there won't be any charging stations, because it will economically unviable to keep one going due to the shortage of customers.
This also means that your effective operating range is limited by your car; you can't go farther than your car batteries can take you on a single charge, because you c
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Something like the upcoming Chevy Volt does it even better than the plug-in modded Priuses available now. It uses its gasoline motor only to charge the batteries, and thus runs far more efficiently than a motor that sometimes pushes the car.
It requires absolutely no change in our gasoline delivery infrastructure (unlike hydrogen), but would require an increase in electricity generation to take advantage of the plug-in aspect for daily use.
Also, once we get
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One work-around is to make the batteries easily swappable, like you drive in, the battery drops down, like dropping your gas tank, and a newly charged battery pops up. Could be done in ten seconds, much faster than filling your gas tank.
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So, you roll up, pop your cell out, it validates against your account and is collected in a bin.
A recharged cell is placed near enough to your car for you to connect it, or alternatively it's clipped into your car by machines. I guess that will depend on the weight of the component.
You pay, you drive off.
Your old cell is recha
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Shock. Surprise.
New method, off the top of my head. Docking stations for cars. Since you don't have a gas powered engine in the front of the car any more, you can put the connector up there. You align up with the power supply plug in the wall and move the car forward into it.
To fix your high amperage/voltage/wire thickness problems, just put in 20 leads, and directly wire
Sure you can make electric filling stations. (Score:2)
If my "gas" is electricity I do have pump at my house. True, if I were completely discharged it might take me ten ho
Why don't you make hydrogen instead? (Score:2)
Maybe it'll be batteries, maybe it'll be hydrogen, maybe even both (hydrogen/battery hybrid). Who cares, so long as it runs?
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Yes, making cleaner electricity would be better than making dirtier electricity. But cars are very, very dirty.
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Why is that so hard to imagine? Joe Average already plugs in a gas "cable" thicker than his wrist every time he fill up. Teaching him to plug in a slightly different, slightly larger cable seems like it would be the least of your worries. I'd be more worried about reliably and safely generating that kind of power on demand.
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One horsepower is about 750 watts, assuming perfect efficiency.
That's 15 kilowatts to keep the car going 60 mph.
It's simpler than that. A typical modern EV gets about 200Wh/mi at 60mph. Some get notably less, like the Aptera, but that's a crazy Jetsons-like car, so we won't count it
But hey, let's go with your 75kWh. It's in the ballpark.
Now let's assume the 'electric sta
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The two thick wires you mention are no worse than those darn rubber nozzles. And 5000 volts isn't such a big deal. Yes, you'll need good insulation and interlocks, but if the battery can take it (and no reasonable battery can), transferring megawatts of power is not an unsolvable problem.
Used batteries (Score:2)
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No.
Charge time and range, compared to gasoline?
It takes approximately four minutes to fill the tank of my VW, to give me around 350 miles of range. I would guess a Li Ion battery charges now in around four hou
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Don't guess.
It's about three hours to fill a typical current EV that's at "empty". Tesla is 3-4. Aptera is 2-4. However, this is mostly battery limited. There are already fast charge batteries ready to hit the market -- Toshiba and AltairNano are producing them. 5-10 minutes charge time. EEStor's EESUs are also 5-10 minutes. And this is for an empty battery. It seems likely that the
Re:But will it explode 10X more powerful ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway, poorly manufactured Lithium batteries are dangerous because they ignite easily. It has very little to do with their energy content.
Re:But will it explode 10X more powerful ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Correct - a bit of amplification (Score:4, Informative)
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Not if the heat from that current is insufficient to cause further energy release. Thus the activation energy of the reaction is also important. Also, it is NOT the Lithium that is being oxidized/reduced during normal operation in a LiCoO2 cell, but the Co ions. The argument about energy density vs damage potential would be true if it was only the ions being reduced/oxidized present, and if their rea
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Blackouts (Score:2)
To avoid blackouts it should also come with a pair of pressurised pants like jet pilots use (preferably with room for an adult diaper).
Re: (Score:2)