Research Promises Drastically Increased LiOn Capacity 378
daem0n1x writes "Could this be the breakthrough we've all been expecting that will finally make the electric car a reality? Researchers of Northwestern University USA discovered a new way to build lithium-ion batteries that changes dramatically both the charge time and capacity [original paper, paywalled]. Guess what it involves? That's right, graphene."
The magical ingredient (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The magical ingredient (Score:5, Funny)
Yo mama!
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Boy I have some bad news for you...
Re:The magical ingredient (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, if you read the university press release, you'll see the magical ingredient is silicon. Current lithium-ion batteries already contain graphene sheets. What they did was
Re:The magical ingredient (Score:5, Insightful)
it doesn't surprise me at all that scientists are finding all sorts of neat uses for graphene. (curious, that's NOT in my dictionary here...) The main novelty here is they're dealing with a building material on an atomic scale. Since things behave very differently at those scales, it's only natural to find new uses for it. And this is only one element they're working with. Imagine what all awaits discovery at the nano scale?
It's like all these years you've been somehow managing to fix fine swiss watches using a baseball bat and tire iron for tools, getting at best mediocre results and only modest improvements from time to time. Now someone hands you a tweezers. Hey, this works better! really? They need to explore other nano materials instead of concentrating all their time on this one new one.
Re:The magical ingredient (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, if you read the university press release, you'll see the magical ingredient is silicon. Current lithium-ion batteries already contain graphene sheets. What they did was
That's not quite the whole story: current lithium-ion battery designs have *graphite* in them, which is a bit disingenuous to describe merely as "many layers of graphene". The fact that in this design, they are in discrete multiple layers (with silicon and, as a result of this research, perforations) is what makes the difference. To my knowledge (correct me if I am wrong) no commercial battery has discrete graphene layers in it (graphene is a relatively new area of research, circa 2004, and conventional li-ion battery design has been relatively unchanged for about 20 years.)
Re:The magical ingredient (Score:5, Informative)
"graphene" is single-atom-thick carbon.
Re:The magical ingredient (Score:5, Insightful)
Graphite is the form of carbon used in pencils. Anyway, my pencil is a lot more than a single atom thick ;-)
Re:The magical ingredient (Score:5, Funny)
I'll bet you say that to all the girls...
Re:The magical ingredient (Score:5, Insightful)
This reduced the time it takes the battery to recharge by up to 10 times.
I just cringe when I read that kind of stuff coming from an article about scientific fields.
Does that mean 1/10 the time?
Re:The magical ingredient (Score:5, Funny)
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Graphene. Is there anything it can't do?
Make nano-Golems to do the work?
It's full of tiny treadmills!
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Re:The magical ingredient (Score:5, Funny)
Yep, it can do anything. In fact Texas Instruments is using it in their next-gen calculators. You'll soon be able to buy a ....
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wait....
Graphene Calculator!
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I figured the magical ingredient would be Onnesium [fictionalmaterials.com], as the headline insinuates.
"Research Promises Drastically Increased Lithium Onnesium Capacity"
Though from the description of Onnesium - viable room-temperature superconductor - this is great news!
Re:The magical ingredient (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, bacon bits are the pixie dust of the universe. There isn't anything they can touch which isn't improved by a whole order of magnitude.
Re:The magical ingredient (Score:4, Insightful)
Guess what bacon is made of?
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Crispy, near-burnt bacon is best. If it flexes, it can still be cooked.
There are many good things about the US (tolerance, the ability to laugh at yourselves, Megan Fox) but your food is generally vile, and charred streaky bacon (as we would call it here in the UK) is one of the worst offenders. Bacon is supposed to be thick and have meat on it, not just be a black version of pork crackling.
Re:The magical ingredient (Score:5, Funny)
With holographic storage and folding color display (Score:3)
I'm assuming that this technology will also come with the elusive holographic storage we've been hearing about, as well as those nearly disposable folding color displays as well.
Increased lion capacity! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Increased lion capacity! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Increased lion capacity! (Score:5, Funny)
Not only are they increasing the capacity, they're increasing the charge speed. That's all we need, millions of super fast lions :(
If Marlin Perkins were here he'd have to rebadge the show EXTREME Wild Kingdom
Increased Lion capacity (Score:5, Funny)
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Lion doesn't have Rosetta, so I can't upgrade either because of one single application. I won't say which one but it's from a company which name starts with "Adob".
Coming to the market in 5 years time? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Coming to the market in 5 years time? (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, I think we have the capability to build cars for a fly. Question is, would they sell?
Better Place (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a must read article on the subject. Electric cars fail because batteries are too expensive, and because they required infrastructure of charging stations. This company however solves both these problems. You make an electric car without the battery, which is cheaper than a standard car and more reliable to boot. Then this company leases you a battery, which costs less per month than gas. And they handle the infrastructure, which includes stations that swap your battery out for a fully charged one. You never wait to charge your battery, and they can swap it out since you don't own it.
http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-09/ff_agassi?currentPage=all [wired.com]
Part of this model is the assumption that battery technology still moves along rapidly. So the company can phase in newer, better batteries and you aren't tied to a battery you purchased when you bought your car.
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I like the idea but it makes you dependent on them plus you need to live/work at driving distance of one of their station.
Re:Better Place (Score:4, Interesting)
Last time I checked, this company was rolling out in select places like Denmark, Israel and Hawaii. It is easier to roll out initially in places with dense populations, and harder to roll out when the population is spread out. Once the model is proven to work, I expect it to spread.
Re:Better Place (Score:4, Interesting)
Close... They are rolling out in areas that have closed traffic systems, so called traffic islands. In Hawaii they have a traffic island because Hawaii is physically a collection of islands. Israel is a traffic island because Israelis rarely drive out of Israel, relations with the neighbors being what they are. Density is certainly a part of it but the closed nature of the roadways is a bigger one.
Re:Better Place (Score:5, Insightful)
A similar argument could be made against internal-combustion automobiles: you are dependent on oil companies and you need to live/work at driving distance to a filling station. I know these are facile comparisons, but I hardly think that these limitations make Better Place an impossible or useless proposition. There are lots of people that live/work in an urban area that could have a sprinkling of such stations. You can recharge the battery at home or work like a typical EV. Being able to swap it out is a way to reduce capital cost/risk in owning a battery outright, and allows you to get a full charge in a few minutes when you need.
Re:Better Place (Score:5, Interesting)
Managing that battery inventory is going to be a huge problem. How are you going to make sure each 'gas station' has enough batteries on hand. Since they're not cheap, it's a huge cost. This might not be a huge problem in the city, but that's not where people have a fear of running out of battery. Heck, a simple EV you charge at home would suffice if you simply traveled in the city.
It's the spaces in the cities or commuters.
The roll out and management of this is a huge problem.
But even assuming you could manage that well enough, there is another minor problem.
Maybe I'm just paranoid coming from Africa where people will steal anything making infrastructure hard to build out... but you're talking about an expensive batter than can be 'easily swapped out'. Something tells me that makes it 'easy to steal'.
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I'm pretty sure you can replace everything you've just typed there with respects to a battery and use the word petrol.
Also presumably you'd only need a new battery when the life in the one you have is exhausted, or you need instant charge. Either way surly that's a easier logistical problem that ensuring the local forecourt has petrol?
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I'm pretty sure you can replace everything you've just typed there with respects to a battery and use the word petrol.
Please see webheaded's comment [slashdot.org].
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Petrol and 'batteries' are in no way comparable. You have to look at the 'cost' per 'fill-up'
With gasoline, you're looking at managing something that costs $50 / fill-up. If you have excess gasoline... who cares. It stays in the tank and it's all good.
With batteries, you're looking at managing something that costs $5000 / fill up (remember, you're renting the entire battery pack, not just the charge). If you have excess batteries, it's a huge overhead burden.
Re:Better Place (Score:4, Interesting)
Gas is relatively cheaper in the United States than England. The last time I traveled to England, gas was something like $3/gallon in the United States and the equivalent (pounds and litre conversion) to $7/gallon in England.
Filling up a sedan with a 14 gallon tank for $50 isn't unreasonable in the United States. That being said, it isn't fair to say that a fill up costs $5000.
The battery on hand might cost that, but the fueling station isn't paying $5000 each time they swap a battery. And keeping several of these batteries on hand is a one-time fixed cost. A gas/petrol station pays daily to have their fuel tanks filled. I actually managed a gas/petrol station while in between IT jobs. Giant tanker trunks have to drive the fuel to each station, which is horribly inefficient and costly.
I haven't seen the Better Place design, but they could use underground conveyors. The batteries aren't just sitting around where they can be stolen. The conveyor moves the battery underground to the robotic arm that swaps it at your car. It wouldn't be vastly different from how gas/petrol stations store all their gas underground.
Re:Better Place (Score:4, Informative)
yes, $50/ fillup. I'm Canadian and drive a small 4 cylinder. That's what it costs me to fill up.
Try running a business... any business.
But if it helps. Let's work through this example.
Let's suppose you run the gas station and want to keep enough reserves to service 1000 fill-ups.
Using gasoline (assuming $50/fill up), you need inventory worth 1000*50 = $50,000. Need more gas, you just have it delivered on demand. It's easy to manage supply and demand here given the low cost per fillup.
Using battery exchange, you would need 1000 battery packs. That's an inventory of 1000 * $5000/battery pack... that's $5,000,000. Not to mention the huge space this would take to store the batteries. Not to mention the complexity of the batteries (failure rates...).
Again, I'm not saying it's impossible. But it is significantly more difficult and requires significantly higher capital costs to have a battery exchange style system.
It's not something I'd put my money into. I'd put my money on new innovation on battery technology, hybrids, rapid charging...
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Massive underground battery tubes my man.. Underground battery tubes.. yup.
Re:Better Place (Score:5, Insightful)
What is easier to store? Gasoline for 1000 cars or battery packs for 1000 cars? Your typical gas station has a couple thousand gallons of gas below it. A battery pack for elevtric cars occupies 16 cubic feet(figure 4'x4' area). To store enough batteries for 1000 cars will require 16'000 feet of storage or roughly the area occupied by a 5 bay mechanics garage.
It will also by using more power than a hospital. And you need one on every street corner. Even with home charging we will need to double the electtical capacity and output of the USA in order to move a significant populations to electric cars.
Take a look at the whole problem. It is really scary when you put hard numbers into play.
Re:Better Place (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, if you look at it that way. But...
You don't need to store 1000 batteries, you only need to store enough for X hours worth of demand. So you take data on your gas station and find the busiest X hours in history, where X is the number of hours it takes to charge a battery. From that you find that you had N cars in your busiest X hours. So then you set up N charging stations with N spare batteries. You can multiply N by some fudge factor to give you the ability to handle failures, unprecedented spikes in demand, etc.
Hard numbers are indeed scary, and we humans are scaredy cats so we evolved this lovely brain to help us out.
Re:Better Place (Score:4, Insightful)
If everyone switched to electric tomorrow then yes, infrastructure would be an issue. Amount of energy would not be (what do you think we're going to do with all the gas if we aren't using it in the cars? Just stop buying oil because we like brown-outs?) You're being scared by numbers that we already have, just calculate the potential energy in the fuel in all the gas stations in the country. Then stop fear-mongering.
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You have to look at the value of something being stolen.
Sure, someone can easily siphon gas out of your tank. Maybe that is worth $50.
If someone were to steal your EV battery pack, it is worth $5000.
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There are other problems with electric cars such as limited range or that half of the car is occupied by the batteries.
Re:Better Place (Score:5, Insightful)
Battery swapping is going to look like a hilariously silly idea 5-10 years from now when an electric car can drive plenty far enough on a single charge. Heck even now you can buy quick-charging electric cars off the showroom floor that can reach an 80% charge in 30 minutes.
And to the guy about to post "Electric cars are a joke! I drive 900 miles every day you know!" well stick to your Ford Ranger with jerry cans in the back, but don't pretend that most people have any use for such range.
Re:Better Place (Score:4, Insightful)
There's this new fangled idea called the rental car.
Such rare requirements aren't worth meeting when choosing your vehicle. Just rent the long range car or the moving van for those times you need such things.
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You still need room to store and charge the batteries. One of today's batteries for pure EVs takes up far more space than 10-15 gallons of gasoline. Then you also need the machinery to swap them, because they're heavy. A facility the size of a standard gas station won't cut it.
We're far more likely to see this new battery tech in use in the next 15 years than this other guy's battery swap model.
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The first battery swapping station in Israel opened in March of 2011. It is already there.
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Except for the fact that Agassi is in charge of the business. And he is running it with the mind set of ending the dependency on oil more than maximizing profits. He has the fuck-you money to do precisely that. He went to Israel first, because they absolutely don't want to depend on oil from their enemies, so it is in their vested interest to put government dollars behind this as well.
Denmark and Hawaii invested dollars because they're concerned about the environment. If you get the right people on board, i
One year half-life? (Score:2)
"Guess what it involves? (Score:5, Funny)
That's right, bacon."
More appealing answer.
Where was this reasearch done? (Score:2)
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The author information for the research paper says , "Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, 60208, USA"
How does that equate to Wuhan University?
Re:Where was this reasearch done? (Score:5, Informative)
The confusion is because the paper linked in the summary is incorrect.
The Northwestern paper is titled "In-Plane Vacancy-Enabled High-Power Si–Graphene Composite Electrode for Lithium-Ion Batteries (pages 1079–1084)" and the summary linked paper is titled "In Situ Generation of Few-Layer Graphene Coatings on SnO2-SiC Core-Shell Nanoparticles for High-Performance Lithium-Ion Storage".
Can people mod me up or have the summary corrected?
New battery stories (Score:5, Funny)
Don't confuse Duration with Capacity (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Don't confuse Duration with Capacity (Score:5, Informative)
They do have more capacity - this isn't the traditional carbon electrode, this is a graphene-stabilised silicon anode, and silicon holds more charge.
They also have more power, as well as more capacity. If the internal resistance is low enough to charge it in 15 minutes, it's low enough to discharge it that fast as well.
Alas, the missing bit is similar innovations in cathode technology.
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Not to mention that Gasoline or Diesel contains ooo 45 MJ/KG while a LIon Battery stores ooo 1 MJ/KG ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energy_density.svg [wikipedia.org]
Seems we have a 'little' ways to go before LIon can replace good ole hydrocarbon fuels.
-- kjh
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We'll likely never replace them in traditional sense. You burn fuel completely and irreversibly in an internal combustion engine, while you have a reversible chemical reaction in Li-ion battery. Reversibility carries a very heavy tag.
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well -- this is slashdot where they actually believe processors just need smaller transistors to do something faster.
And when they finally hit the market... (Score:5, Insightful)
... they'll fit right into the steady curve of slowly but steadily increasing battery capacity. People assume that all these battery advancements we keep hearing about never pan out. Well, some of them do, but once the researchers silly claims are brought down to be a bit more realistic, and after the years go by before they actually hit the market, they're just incremental improvements on what was available before they came out.
There's nothing wrong with that.
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...but once the researchers silly claims are brought down to be a bit more realistic...
Make sure you distinguish between the claims that are made by the researchers and the claims that are made by human resources/technology transfer/publicity departments. Anyone who has ever seen that particular machine in action will attest to its ability to transform modest scientific claims into ones would make a late-night infomercial host blush.
Cars? (Score:2)
Cost ? (Score:3)
Available in 3-5 years, naturally... (Score:3)
In other words, they don't know if it will scale.
Cars? Who cares about cars? (Score:4, Interesting)
Wrong article linked in summary (Score:5, Informative)
The Northwestern paper is titled "In-Plane Vacancy-Enabled High-Power Si–Graphene Composite Electrode for Lithium-Ion Batteries (pages 1079–1084)". The article linked in the summary is titled "In Situ Generation of Few-Layer Graphene Coatings on SnO2-SiC Core-Shell Nanoparticles for High-Performance Lithium-Ion Storage".
Can people mod me up or have the summary corrected?
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Re:Better battery life is always a year away (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Better battery life is always a year away (Score:5, Informative)
On the other hand, with the exponential increase in transistor count / computing power has some a corollary effect of decreasing energy needed to do that computation: Koomey's Law [wikipedia.org]. So if I take a look at the battery pack from my 5-y.o. flip phone and compare it to what's in an iPhone, they are roughly the same volume. But the newer battery has more capacity, and the newer phone does jumping jacks around my old feature phone, and has about the same amount of talk time / standby time, if not more.
Call me an optimist, but I think that in this regard we're still coming out ahead.
Re:Better battery life is always a year away (Score:5, Informative)
Still, the main use case they are touting in the summary is cars. Faster charging, higher storage density batteries are a huge deal in that space. One of the big complaints with electric cars is that they take much longer to charge than a gas powered car takes to fill up, so faster charging is a big deal. More power density means either a) you can store the same amount of power in fewer batteries (thus theoretically reducing the weight and cost) or b) can get much farther on the same sized battery.
Right now electric cars are right on the cusp of being really commercially viable. If they become a hair cheaper, a hair longer range, a hair quicker to charge... it could put them over the top. This has the potential to do all three, and if the research is accurate increase all of them by more than a hair.
Plus, you know, I wouldn't complain if my iPhone went 3 days without a charge.
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But the newer battery has more capacity, and the newer phone does jumping jacks around my old feature phone, and has about the same amount of talk time / standby time, if not more
You lost me there. I could almost get through a weekend without charging my old feature phone if it had good signal. My smartphone doesn't come close to that.
Re:/. is an empty shell of what it once was. (Score:5, Funny)
I don't even comment on /. anymore.
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Re:Reality (Score:5, Insightful)
Flying cars are already a reality. They are just expensive and inefficient.
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And they only last a few seconds until they hit the ground after you drive them off the cliff. You forgot that part.
Re:Reality (Score:5, Insightful)
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Hey they're practical. A Nissan Leaf or Mistubishi i-whateverthefuck (depending on region) would both suit my needs for daily transportation quite well. The Mitsu is even affordable.
Re:Reality (Score:4, Insightful)
That's quite affordable for a car that runs on electricity which is far, far cheaper than gas, and requires much less maintenance.
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Not all of us live in countries where "compact" is classed as a car that can comfortably seat 5 large adults and their luggage.
The Leaf is a pretty average sized car.
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Just how are they "inefficient"? Tesla's website has plenty of "scientific-like" data showing that they are *much* more efficient users of source energy...
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Democracies are already a reality. They're just expensive and inefficient.
FTFY.
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New technology will not revolutionize the market - not unless it can be mass-produced at reasonable price.
There are countless energy technologies that are 'better' than what we have. But they meaning nothing to the economy and to consumers unless they come with a plan to manufacture them cheaply.
Yeah, or the patent could be bought by Exxon-Mobile or some other status quo company so they can sit on it or stifle its development. It has already done [wikipedia.org].
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If we had listened to Negative Nancys like you, we would never have gotten the flying car.
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or duke nukem forever...
Re:The Singularity? (Score:4, Insightful)
If there's one event that tipped us into the Singularity that should be the invention of the integrated circuit in the late 1950s.
Or maybe the invention of the scientific method, but that happened centuries before, too much could nave happened in between.
Re:I though they were already a reality... (Score:4, Informative)
That seems like a problem in your argument. There is no electric car+battery combination which costs $16k. The figure you cite is less than half the actual retail cost of an electric car+battery. Even the prius plug-in, due next year, costs over $30k, and the battery pack only provides a 10 mile range.
Retail electricity for residential consumers in states which don't burn coal is about $0.14/KwH, not $0.10. If we burn coal to generate electricity, then we've negated any environmental benefit of electric cars, so we should use the $0.14/KwH price for electricity. Electricity from renewables would be at least 50% more expensive than even that.
Let's try a comparison with these figures. The Nissan Leaf costs $35,000, and an approximately equivalent Nissan Versa Hatchback costs $15,000. If we drive the versa for 150,000 miles with $4/gal fuel at 35 mpg, we pay $17,142 for fuel. If we drive the Leaf for 150,000 mi (which is the rated life of the battery pack), the fuel (electricity) would cost $8,400 (leaf has a 24 KwH battery pack which costs $3.36 to recharge at $0.14/KwH and takes us 60 mi on average, for a per-mile charge of $0.056, *100,000 = $8,400).
We must also include the cost of financing. Interest at 3% above inflation for 5 years would cost $2250 for the Versa and $5250 for the Leaf. Even if you pay using cash upfront, you are foregoing interest you could have earned by investing the same money, so it's an opportunity cost.
There will also be different insurance costs, for insuring a $15,000 car against theft vs. a $35,000 car. But let's ignore that now.
Of course the government will give you a $7,500 tax break right now if you buy an electric car, but will only do so for a small number of buyers until the incentive expires, so let's ignore that now because it's not generalizable.
The total cost of the Versa for 150k mi is $34,392, and the total cost of the Leaf for the same distance is $48,650. It costs about 41% more to drive a similar electric car at present, not counting insurance or limited-time government incentives. It is not cost-competitive.
It's possible that an electric car will become competitive if gasoline costs far more in the future and batteries cost less. If the Leaf costs $30k in the future and gasoline costs $7/gal (in 2011 dollars), then the Leaf would be approximately cost-competitive with a gasoline-powered car. This circumstance is definitely possible within the next 15 years.
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Except that the true hidden cost of using coal for electricity "are probably even higher than the studyâ(TM)s worst-case estimate of more than $500 billion a year."
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/tallying-coals-hidden-cost/ [nytimes.com]
And the true hidden cost of oil is probably in the same range:
http://www.wealthdaily.com/articles/oil-price-fantasy-the-true-cost-of-crude/2730 [wealthdaily.com]
"According to estimates, we spend nearly half of our entire $685 billion defense budget protecting and ensuring the free flow of th