Developing Battery Replacement Infrastructure For Electric Cars

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."

Re:Why bother?

[master5o1]

Although, like the (gas) bottole-swap stations at some service stations [nz] ... Thsi could be done similar, too bad batteries are not like gas bottles (container is not seemingly unlimited use).

it was my idea

[TheGratefulNet]

not that its a hard-to-discover idea.

after owning an electric scooter and being limited by the 15mi battery on it, it was OBVIOUS that a battery-swap station would make sense. people do that all the time, informally (the hard core ones do). they'll leave a battery pack (on scooters they are semi-sealed fabric covered 'modules') and charger at work and when they scoot to work, it sits there on charge ready for the return run home at the end of the day; but you also do have a spare batt in case you need it. the idea of battery-swap locations just is obvious to anyone who has owned a limited-range electric vehicle.

hats off to the guys in the company working on this. I'd join their company if I could - I believe in this concept *that* much. too bad there is so much resistance (no pun intended) in the US toward alternative non-oil solutions. if we opened our mind and stopped keeping Big Oil on top and in power, we'd have this trivial (it is!) problem solved by now. its mostly not a tech problem, truth be told; but more of an acceptance toward the mind-shift of a swappable resource instead of an 'owned' one.

we're slowly getting there, though; you can go to many supermarkets and swap your empty propane gas tank for a full one. we just need a 'heats and minds' campain to make this a US goal to convert to x% of battery-swap use by a certain date.

think of how this would scare the pants off the arabs (lol) if we showed INITIATIVE to get off their crack^Woil habit. we'd FINALLY have a true scary bargaining chip that they simply won't be able to ignore. money talks and if we can cut off our *need* for mid-east oil, that would finally tip the balance of power away from the oil rich middle east nations. stripped of their oil power, they have NOTHING to threaten the world with. they become powerless and financially stripped.

its a great dream. can it be real?

RTG's, baby...

[BobMcD]

Someone needs to shoot this battery idea in the head.

RTG is the only logical source of power for a tractor-trailer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator [wikipedia.org]

You need A LOT more power per gram than batteries will EVER allow for if you intend to start replacing infrastructure.

People KNOW this. Why, then are they pushing us towards failure? What's in it for them??

Re:Standard values not applicable here.

[robot_love]

Or you could pay for the electricity used when you return it, as opposed to when you pick it up. If it only got you 20 miles, you only pay a small amount. If it got you 400 miles, you pay a larger amount.

If you paid by amps (or whatever the relevant unit of electricity is) instead of miles, it would further encourage you to drive in an efficient manner. Sounds like a win-win.

Of course, the car is going to need an accurate way to gauge how far the battery can go, and service stations would probably have a minimum mileage requirement for any battery they offered, but charging after instead of before would solve the "I got a lousy battery" problem.

Re:Future benefits

[orkysoft]

Yeah, the fact that they can charge the batteries at night, when electricity demand is lower, should be a big advantage.

But if they're going to swap out the powerpacks at refueling stations, why should they actually be rechargeable batteries instead of some other power source that can be recharged in some other way (e.g. a more complicated chemical process that can be implemented at the refueling station)?

Not reported != not happening

[jeffb (2.718)]

That's interesting, since a co-worker bought her Prius in 2002 and got a surprise battery replacement in 2006. (She hadn't noticed any problems, and isn't the type to ask questions; she took the car in for routine maintenance, they told her they'd replaced the battery and weren't charging her anything for it, she said "Cool!")

I don't know how prevalent this is, but for my N=1, I'm seeing a 100% replacement rate at four years.

Of course, the weasel words "due to wear and tear" let them get away with anything.

Re:Not reported != not happening

[wbo]

Ah, but which battery did they replace? The Prius uses a small Lead-acid battery for the gas engine in addition to the big main NiMH battery pack used for the electric motor.

Depending on the environment, the Lead-acid battery can need regular replacement. The NiMH battery should not need replacing unless it was defective.

Re:Future benefits

[TheRaven64]

They will be batteries because battery is what we call something that stores chemical energy and releases electrical energy. They may not be LiIon or whatever, but they will be some form of chemical storage of electrical energy. You raise an interesting question about the recharging mechanism, however. It may be that you can more efficiently recharge some batteries using a large charger - especially one that can replace the electrolyte with something different while recharging. I expect that if this takes off, we will start to see a lot of battery-swapping stations generating their own power. Think about all of those interstates where you have hundreds of miles of road with not much of interest along it. You could buy a few acres of land in the middle there quite cheaply, put solar arrays and / or wind turbines up and use it to charge batteries while there is power (i.e. during the day, or at windy times). You may even be able to sell battery power for less than the equivalent fossil fuel cost, because you don't have to ship the fuel out to the middle of nowhere.

Re:Why bother?

[hal2814]

I don't know about propane bottles, but CO2 bottles have to be checked periodically and recertified that they can hold air at the specified pressure. The tank itself doesn't go bad often but the control nozzle that screws into the tank will have to be replaced on occasion. The company I swap with handles that recertification. I presume if we were to go to a swap system for electric car batteries the company handled the swapping would be required to periodically make sure the batteries were tested and approved for safe and reliable usage.

Re:Standardize battery pack

[Rei]

Manual? Are you serious? What are we, weightlifters?

A lot of battery pack swapping proponents have no clue how big and heavy EV batteries are. Let me be specific: picture an internal combustion engine. Now double its dimensions and mass. Give it high voltage connections that must be firm to prevent arcing, and keep it securely in place so it doesn't shift around. Now go manually swap that.

And no, a battery is not a battery is not a battery. Go try to shove a laptop battery pack in your flashlight or a AA in your car's engine or a lead-acid battery in your laptop. Different vehicle size, shape, weight distribution, price, performance, and technology profiles have different requirements of size, shape, chemistry, wiring, fuses, and series/parallel cell arrangements in an EV's battery pack.

Re:Why bother?

[guruevi]

I'm not sure if you want to be swapping electrolytes at a 'charging station'. Ever gone to a gas station and they had the hose leak? I know gas stations where that has been the case for at least 6 months, nobody is fixing it. Then there are the gas stations where the ground has to be sanitized after one of those large containers has sprung a leak, a preventable problem to begin with and regulations have required the container to be inside some type of enclosure for the last few years so you can imagine how long some of them have been there. Electrolytes are usually more corrosive than current gasoline products and will break down plastic and metal alike in a matter of months.

Imagine the current gas station practices generating the same problems with lithium where even a small leak could become explosive. Other materials are also toxic, have 'explosive' features or are generally bad for the environment (usually worse than gas).

Capacitors (ultracaps), not batteries.

[citizenr]

Batteries wont work in the long run. They:
-get old and lose capacity
-are slow to charge


We need better ultracaps. For example this
http://www.maxwell.com/ultracapacitors/products/large-cell/bcap3000.asp [maxwell.com]
has approximately same capacity as a standard AA battery (3 watt-hours) and can output(be charged at) sustained 7.5 KW until its empty. Thats almost 3000 Amps at 2.7 Volts.

Lets look at something bigger:
http://www.maxwell.com/ultracapacitors/products/modules/bmod0063-125v.asp [maxwell.com]

125V, 60KG
sustained current 150A
peak 1 second 750A

My broken math tells me its equivalent to ten 12V ~2Ah batteries.


Tesla's pack is 450KG 56kWh, 225kW for the engine (600 amps at 375V), needs 4 hours to charge. Lets assume 9 bmod0063-125v modules.
540KG, 375V, 450A, 2250A peak. 168KW. ~2.2kWh.

We need breakthrough that will bump ultracaps capacity ten-twenty fold. That would bring us to current Li-Ion levels, but with charge times measured in seconds.