Developing Battery Replacement Infrastructure For Electric Cars 369
FathomIT sends in a NY Times profile of Shai Agassi, owner of a company named Better Place, who is working to build the infrastructure to support large numbers of small-scale charging spots for electric cars, as well as fast, automated battery swap stations.
"The robot — a squat platform that moves on four dinner-plate-size white wheels — scuttled back and forth along a 20-foot-long set of metal rails. At one end of the rails, a huge blue battery, the size of a large suitcase, sat suspended in a frame. As we watched, the robot zipped up to the battery, made a nearly inaudible click, and pulled the battery downward. It ferried the battery over to the other end of the rails, dropped it off, picked up a new battery, hissed back over to the frame and, in one deft movement, snapped the new battery in the place of the old one. The total time: 45 seconds."
Interesting... (Score:4, Insightful)
Makes Sense (Score:2, Insightful)
Good idea this. The main complaint about totally electric cars is the charge time and this would negate this for a small cost. The company taking the battery could charge it up and use it as stock for the next hot-swap to come in.
If they can get this right (both the infrastructure and the price for the service), it could really help electric car adoption in the future since you'll be able to "re-fuel" just like a normal car, in some respects.
Standard values not applicable here. (Score:5, Insightful)
When you buy a litre of petrol, it should take you a set distance. When you fill up on LPG, Hydrogen or whatever, the same is the case. There is one important factor in the battery swapping idea that is fundamentally different though. Batteries degrade and can at times do so in strange ways.
Say, for example, that someone has let a spare battery sit idle for some months, charges it up at home and, knowing it's rubbish now, goes off to the nearest fuel stop to change it. Automated process charges it, dispenses it. You get stuck on the freeway after only a few kilometres.
If you stick to your own battery, then you can tell the condition of the battery over time. No dramas. Even with thorough checking though, battery changing services have a lot of questions in regards to reliability and liabilities if it is to work. Who picks up the tab for a dead battery? The owner or the 'fuel' vendor?
Standardization problem (Score:2, Insightful)
This requires all batteries to have a standard size and compatible electrical properties. If we settle for a standard now, it will hamper development of better models that require changes that break the compatibility. Current technology appears to be unsuitable for widespread electric car use, so this is not the time where you want to slow down any improvements.
Propane Tank Model (Score:4, Insightful)
This is similar to the Propane Tank business model.
The BIG problem I see here is that with a propane tank, you always get the same amount of propane in return. I see potential for old batteries to float through the system, getting less charges.
Now that I think about it, I bet this will be like buying "premium" gas.
Premium = Batteries 2yrs old, etc. /rambling
Standardize battery pack (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Interesting... (Score:4, Insightful)
Swap/recharge my car (Score:5, Insightful)
I was wondering when this would come up. I know way (way) back in the day when they were first almost seriously talking about electric cars, they seemed to indicate swapping the batteries.
A battery swap makes a LOT more sense than recharging in the vehicle. Waiting for an hour or more for batteries to charge would really ruin a road trip, if you had to do it every 300 miles or so. Every 4 hours of drive time on wide open interstates would become 5 hours or more.
Think of a cross country drive. 2500 miles between two places I've driven between a few times takes 41.6 hours, when average 60mph. I could usually average 60 by only stopping to buy fuel and go to the bathroom (same stop). Ya, even those stops really ruin your average speed. That would make it a 52 hour drive instead. I'd rather be at my destination for those 10 hours, rather than still driving. :)
But, there would be other considerations. Does the battery swap location have sufficient batteries to handle peak demand? Like, on a holiday weekend, when everyone's driving electric cars, and they're all going out of town, a swap/recharge facility may be swamped, and not be able to have charged batteries fast enough.
I worked in a warehouse for a while. The battery room not only recharged, but rebuilt the batteries as needed. All the heavy equipment in the warehouse used the same batteries (more or less). We had moments, particularly towards the end of the day, where equipment was being run hard, and they had simply run out of charged batteries. It was simple enough to move people over to doing things by hand if they couldn't use the heavy equipment. In the case of a car, towards the end of a busy day, customers aren't going to be satisfied with "Sorry, we're out of charged batteries. They'll be ready in 2 hours, but we close in an hour. Come back tomorrow, or plug in for the next few hours and charge it yourself."
They will also have attrition to contend with. As batteries fail, they will be pulled out of service. This is a good thing as far as the car owners are concerned. We have the same situation with propane tanks right now. They have a life, where they must be reinspected before use again. There are plenty of places that take your empty tank, and hand you a full one. I've been BBQing for many years with propane, and never had to buy a "new" tank. I have been refused a full tank because they didn't have any though. It's not pleasant to hear that I can't BBQ when friends are already coming over, because I can't get a full tank. Luckily, I've always been able to find another location with available full tanks. It gets tight on holiday weekends though.
Re:Used batteries? (Score:2, Insightful)
Serialize the batteries (with strong RFID or something). Make the history of the battery publicly available.
It won't absolutely prevent fraud, but if you go to a reputable power station, they will be able to rent (or whatever you want to call it) you a battery that does what it says on the label. There could even be a battery quality charge (or rebate) included on the energy bill (depending on how much worse or better the replacement is).
I guess the point is that it doesn't have to be a random replacement.
Re:free battery replacement (Score:4, Insightful)
This sounds like a great way to use the hell out of my batteries, and then swap them for a brand new set.
Since you're only renting the batteries short-term in this plan, there's no financial reason for you to abuse them and then swap them out.
The next item is battery theft.
Who would a thief sell them to? The vendor who owns them? I can't imagine the electric company will pay top dollar to buy back its own property, as opposed to just siccing the cops on the thief dumb enough to try.
Re:Exactly why this is unworkable. (Score:3, Insightful)
You have to have leased batteries for this to make sense. But then leasing costs for the battery would end up being more than Gas and remind people how uneconomical BEVs really are.
That's the plan: to lease the batteries. They contend that they can sell you power cheaper per mile driven than you can buy gasoline, and they're probably right. Among other things, consider that they can charge the batteries at night when electric demand (and costs) are lower, and potentially sell back excess during peak times. The charging plant could very likely be a profit center even if they never rented a single battery to end users.
Great Plan! (Score:3, Insightful)
Just remember to get the automakers to buy in and actually *use* standardized batteries and mountings.
Good luck with that. I don't see many advantages to Toyota adapting their designs to whatever Ford chooses.
I don't see car makers actually choosing even very limited (2-3) types of battery/mounting combinations. There are more variables in vehicle design than that, and it's unlikely that you can accomodate the same configuration in a next-gen Prius that you do in an electric Escape that you do in an electric Civic.
Of course, we could all drive cars very similar in size, layout, and rear-end shape. Sure. that's the solution, make us all drive the same car. I'm sure whatever they have in mind will let me drag home a few bales of organic mulch, or a new big-screen TV, or that new sofa I've been just creaming over at the store.
Nope, not likely. Nice idea, and if it serves 50% of vehicles out there, it might be worth it. Just don't think it will be the one-size-fits-all fix. I wish him the best of luck, and hope he can make it work for half of us.
Re:Interesting... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Standardization problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Standard values not applicable here. (Score:3, Insightful)
When you buy a litre of petrol, it should take you a set distance.
On what planet? It depends on how fast and well you drive, how powerful your engine is and what condition it is in...
What you mean, is that a litre of standard petrol contains a known amount of usable chemical energy, whereas the yield of a fully charged battery will decline over time.
battery changing services have a lot of questions in regards to reliability and liabilities if it is to work.
You never actually own the battery - it belongs to the power company - you just pay a deposit when you pick up your first battery. Regular wear and tear on the battery is included in the fuel costs - mistreat it and you lose your deposit.
I'm sure that the legalities have all been pretty well worked out by the bottled gas industry (and a faulty gas cylinder is gonna raise far more liability issues than the cost of a tow truck).
Plus, any half-decent modern 'smart' battery is going to have a chip in it which monitors the charge/discharge history, so the condition of each battery can be automatically monitored and used for "fair" billing.
You're probably going to need an account with the power company that covers both home recharging (on some off-peak tariff) and pit stops.
Re:it was my idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, the "long tail" argument -- that old zombie of electric vehicles. No matter how many times you knock it down, it comes coming at you.
Power plants are more efficient than internal combustion engines. While the engine itself can *peak* at a fairly high effiency number (percentage-wise, as much as the upper 30s for gasoline and mid 40s for diesel), that's not what you get in practice, as that's only for a narrow torque/rpm range. In practice, you also have parasitic and braking losses. Total well-to-wheel consumption is about 14% for gasoline and 17% for diesel. Engines are slowly getting more efficient, but at the same time fuel production is getting *less* efficient as we have to move more to syncrude and deepwater (think tar sands and outer continental shelf). Power plants, however, are only getting more efficient, and fairly rapidly. Well-to-AC power for an average coal plant in the US is 32%, and natural gas is 42%. Those numbers are higher in Europe. Next gen coal plants are over 40% and next-gen natural gas 60%-ish. Coal, the dirty fuel, is only half our generation. After that is natural gas (a very low carbon fuel per unit energy) and nuclear (a near zero carbon fuel). After that is hydro and then wind (both near zero carbon). There's also a smattering of other generation methods such as diesel, solar, geothermal, and biomass that combined make up a couple percent of our grid.
AC power transmission in the US averages 92.8% efficiency. Your typical EV charger is 92-93% efficient (rapid chargers, closer to 90%). Li-ion batteries are generally 96% (rapid charge) to 99% (trickle charge) efficient. Electric drivetrains average 85-90% efficient (they can peak at over 95% on a really good one). And regen braking is pretty much standard. So your net well-to-wheels efficiency is very high, and your carbon is low. And while petroleum gets dirtier, the grid gets cleaner. Last year, for example, over 2/5ths of our new power that went online was wind, and most of the rest was natural gas.
But wait, it gets better. Most EV charging is done at night, on a timer to take advantage of low off-peak rates. Coal power plants take a while to ramp down. In the process, you can sometimes get what's called "spinning standby" -- power generation capacity that's literally wasted because there's nothing to consume it. This mainly occurs in the evenings. Charging off of it is literally free of environmental consequences. Furthermore, most power plants run more efficiently at higher capacity. Evening out the day/night peaks makes the grid as a whole more efficient.
Perhaps having a DOE study conducted at PNL [pnl.gov] explain it to you will help. Here's a graph [daughtersoftiresias.org] comparing the efficiencies of different drivetrain options, and here's one for emissions [daughtersoftiresias.org].
Can this zombie of a notion please accept its headshot and stay down?
Re:RTG's, baby... (Score:3, Insightful)
zinc-air (Score:3, Insightful)
That's where the future lies, not H2 and not LiIon. "Recharging" involves removing the spent anode and inserting a fresh array of zinc rods and can be done fast. The salt can then be processed off-site to retrieve the zinc metal, usually by electrolysis (that's the true recharging step).
It's a proven technology,already powering mass transit and postal systems in US, Europe and Singapore, it's cheap, has good power density while still having room for improvement, what's not to like about it?
Re:Plenty of problems. (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine if the automobile industry was just starting today, or perhaps was always electric cars but we had to switch away from it (say, discharging batteries were found to cause cancer), just imagine what all the nay-sayers would be saying if someone proposed a system where the average moron could just go to any corner service station and start pumping extremely flammable/explosive liquid that has percent-levels of known highly potent carcinogens (note surface water needs to be in the part-per-billion of such compounds to be considered safe). Imagine the liability of a bunch of grease monkeys managing storage tanks with 1000s of gallons of this toxic stuff.
Puts things in context. Anyone can come up with good reasons for not doing anything. The key is selecting the best of an array of imperfect choices.
Re:RTG's, baby... (Score:5, Insightful)
You need to give a bit more justification than 'it can be done' if you want people to take you seriously. RTGs have a terrible power to weight ratio. The best one in the article you linked to is around 0.06W/Kg just for the power source. Let's assume that this is a terrible design and we can improve on it by an order of magnitude, giving 0.6W/Kg. Now let's assume that the car and passengers weigh nothing.
The formula for kinetic energy is E = 1/2 mv^s. By dividing both sides by a time factor, we get P = 1/2 ma^2. Divide through by mass, and we get P/m = 1/2 a^2. Substituting in the value from the RTG output (Power / mass) we get 0.6 = 1/2 a ^2, or a = sqrt(1.2), approximately 1.1 metres per second per second.
Remember that this is for a massless vehicle with an RTG with an order of magnitude higher power output than any that anyone has built so far. It would take a little over 26 seconds to reach 60mph. Even a fairly rubbish battery powered car can reach 60mph in under 10 seconds - this hypothetical RTG-powered car would take 13 seconds to go from 0-30mph, which is a dangerously low acceleration for most urban roads. And, note, that this is assuming that the (massless) engine is also 100% efficient. In the real world, you would be lucky to get a tenth of this acceleration, so you'd take more than 2 minutes to go from 0-30mph. Not really a very practical solution.
RTGs are great for applications where they do not have to move (or, as with spacecraft, where the motive force comes from elsewhere), or which have a constant power drain. They are incredibly badly suited to automotive applications. Betavoltaics, as I said, are potentially a viable solution, but RTGs are not. Just because something can give 40W for a number of years does not make it a good replacement for something that gives several kW for a few hours. Sure, the energy output may be the same or greater, but the power output is much lower.
Re:Standard values not applicable here. (Score:3, Insightful)
That kind of test doesn't really work accurately. It only tells whether a chemical battery is completely (or almost) unusable, but otherwise it's remarkably unreliable.
Shai is a modern hero (Score:3, Insightful)
Shai Agassi is somebody I've been watching for a while. He's the only person I've seen with a plan that:
1) Will not result in a loss of quality of life for US citizens
2) Can eliminate the US' dependency on foreign oil.
3) Can "fix" the problems that the power grid has with "alternative" energy sources, which generally produce energy as available rather than as needed.
4) Will actually *save* money and resources over the current transportation system.
5) Eventually result in a power grid that's virtually immune to natural disasters and/or terrorist attacks.
Every so often, there's somebody who really, really, really groks the biggest problems society faces. Henry Ford was one such fellow, Shai Agassi is another.
I hope hope hope hope that the United States gets firmly behind this guy, because he's the one that could actually do it.
He understands that Ethanol and Hydrogen are effectively red herrings that favor the petroleum industry. His solution works with wind, solar, coal, nuclear, biomass, etc. His solution, if implemented, would result in a power grid that could maintain its stability even with a severe disruption of power flow due to the distributed nature of it. (Every car becomes a potential power source as needed, with rules determined by the owners of the cars)
There are few people who really, really, really get it. Shai Agassi is one of them. No, I'm not in any way attached or related to him, or his company. I'm just an upper-middle class American who gives a damn about the future of his country and mankind.
Re:Shai is a modern hero (Score:2, Insightful)