Lithium Air Batteries Get Boost From IBM and DOE 240
coondoggie writes "The Department of Energy and IBM are serious about developing controversial lithium air batteries capable of powering a car for 500 miles on a single charge – a huge increase over current plug-in batteries that have a range of about 40 to 100 miles, the DOE said. The agency said 24 million hours of supercomputing time out of a total of 1.6 billion available hours at Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories will be used by IBM and a team of researchers from those labs and Vanderbilt University to design new materials required for a lithium air battery."
Hopefully not vaporware. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because this is a game changing technology, if it pans out.
Patents? (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, because the DOE is bankrolling their computer time, does that mean the results will not be patent-encumbered?
Or are we in for more NiMH [wikipedia.org] crap?
DOE is serious? (Score:2)
24 million hours? So that's.... 2,500+ yrs? (Score:5, Informative)
Same. 24 million hours? There's only 8,765 hours in a year [google.com], so what is that, about 2,500 years?
So I googled it. Apparently supercomputer hours aren't people hours, they're processor-hours, so 1 processor working for 1 hour is 1 processor hour. [rochester.edu] 24 million hours means (# of processors) * (# of hours) = 24 million. For example, (24,000 processors) * (1,000 hours) = 24 million. So it could be done in 41 days, not 2,500 years, if they have 24,000 processors working on it.
Not sure if I like this method of measuring processor usage since a project that took a million hours in 2001 wouldn't take a million hours in 2010 but that's what's in the article.
Oh and to answer your question: no, it probably doesn't self-destruct but it'd probably be replaced since I'd imagine if 1.5% is anywhere near my hypothetical 41 days then that'd put 1.6 billion at about 7.4 yrs.
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Oh and to answer your question: no, it probably doesn't self-destruct but it'd probably be replaced since I'd imagine if 1.5% is anywhere near my hypothetical 41 days then that'd put 1.6 billion at about 7.4 yrs.
It's much more likely that the supercomputer is capable of 1.6 billion processor hours per year (or month?) and IBM is gonna be using 1.5% of that capacity. When IBM is done, that 1.5% will be freed up and can be used for something else.
ibm doesn't have its own supercomputers? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:DOE is serious? (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry I'm back and I have answers.
The Oak Ridge "Jaguar" Supercomputer is the World's Fastest, with 37,376 six-core AMD processors [sciencedaily.com]. That puts it at 224,256 processors, so those 24 million hours should be done in 107 hours, or a little more than 4 days.
The 1.6 billion hours comes from the here: [sciencedaily.com] "....computing facilities at Oak Ridge and Argonne national laboratories will employ a competitive peer review process to allocate researchers 1.6 billion processor hours in 2010." That works out to be about 297 days.
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Re:Hopefully not vaporware. (Score:4, Insightful)
"Affordable" isn't going to be anytime soon, at least not for comparison shoppers. Even at $5 a gallon, a decent sedan will go 100,000 miles on $20,000 of fuel (and neither of those assumptions are particularly aggressive, that $20,000 might get you closer to 250,000 miles).
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Well, since the average driver drives about 12,000 miles a year, and the average car is on the road for nearly two decades....
Sure, an individual owner doesn't keep it that long, but what that means is that your depreciation will be lower, since the vehicle remains cheap to operate. Once the luxury of a luxury vehicle wears off, or the style of a stylish vehicle becomes dated, you don't have much left. But efficiency is always a seller. A Hummer doesn't cost that much more than a Prius, but it depreciate
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Really? You remember seeing a lot of 1985 Corollas back in 2005?
I'm not sure where you got that statistic. Maybe your cars have stayed on the road for two decades, but I don't see that many 1990 cars on the road these days.
Do you live in Arizona or something? Here in Chicago, I don't see that many 20 year-old cars.
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Agreed. I live in Eastern Canada where they use a lot of salt on the roads this time of year. Even with undercoating, you'll rarely see a car which outlasts it's engine. Usually a car's body rots to pieces before it's mechanically unsuitable for continued use.
There are many cars from as recent as 2000 or 2001 that are full of rust holes from people who don't bother to undercoat.
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Re:Hopefully not vaporware. (Score:4, Informative)
The *average* age of a car on the road today is 9.4 years and rising [consumerreports.org].
Re:Hopefully not vaporware. (Score:5, Informative)
Accord [automotive.com]. Prius [automotive.com].
The Prius depreciates a lot as soon as you drive it off the lot, but less than half as much each year after that -- despite being a more expensive vehicle.
Efficiency = low depreciation for the long run.
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Well, for the record, GM says the Volt's pack costs under $10k. And that's first-generation. The raw materials in these types of cells are dirt cheap, so there's major potential for prices to drop in volume production.
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If you look at existing (NiMH) battery technology for something like a Toyota Prius, you could expect an 8-year service life (based on the 8-year warranty) with a battery replacement cost of around US$3,000 afterward [howstuffworks.com]. And Toyota's saying that their cells are still going strong after 200,000 miles. Mind you, those NiMH cells aren't powering the entire vehicle for the entire trip.
Let's say the newer Li-Air cells will have a similar service life and are twice the cost, so US$6,000 - how much will you be paying
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More stuff on Prius battery ranges here. [caradvice.com.au]
The only two recorded Prius battery changes in Australia (at the time of the article) where at 350,000km (220,000mi) and 500,000km (310,000mi). That's pretty good mileage and they're thrashing these things about in Taxis clocking up around 200,000km (125,000mi) per annum.
Re:Hopefully not vaporware. (Score:5, Informative)
Metal-air battery chemistries have been used before in EVs - specifically zinc-air batteries [wikipedia.org] - but they are generally primary cells and need to be mechanically recharged. TFA mentions charging so possibly the lithium-air cells are proper secondary cells. Also, the specific power of air-based batteries is historically very low, and I note that the only mention of power in TFA is where they say:
The most important [scientific challenges] are to realize a high percentage of the theoretical energy density, to improve electrical efficiency of recharging, to increase the number of times the battery can be cycled, to limit the negative effects of moisture in the air, and to improve the power density.
Of course you could always do a hybrid battery pack using Li-Air for bulk storage and nanophosphate lithium or even ultracaps for load levelling.
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LiPoly doesn't currently have the power-to-weight ratio of some battery technologies, which is a big factor for car batteries.
I was looking for a definite reference for this, but I can't see many LiPoly specific references. The Wikipedia page says 7.1kW/kg, which seems stupendously high and, I suspect, completely wrong. The Wikipedia entry for Li-Ion says 250-340 W/kg, which is more reasonable, while NiMH shows as 25-1000 W/kg. Both of these ranges are easily found elsewhere. LiPoly runs similar chemist
Re:Hopefully not vaporware. (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, and also, to help you "extrapolate" properly in the future:
* EV drivetrains are currently handmade in small volumes, so they're very expensive. Even a low-end AC drivetrain will cost you about $10k (say, a DMOC445, AC24LS, and a Manzanita Micro PFC charger). A good one like the AC-150 that the Roadster's drivetrain was originally based on will run you more like $25k.
* The Tesla Roadster's pack is very, very different from the Volt's, so it's not a good idea to compare the two. The Roadster's is a high capacity based on cobalt cells with a massive cooling system and a high DoD. The Volt's is low capacity based on manganese cells with a smaller cooling system and a low DoD.
* The Tesla Roadster is a luxury carbon fiber sports car that does 0-60 in under 4 seconds. You get what you pay for.
Re:Hopefully not vaporware. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hopefully not vaporware. (Score:5, Funny)
with the current job market people would be moving twice a year to keep up. Might as well just get an RV [wikipedia.org] and live your new employer's parking lot until they go bankrupt and you have to change jobs again.
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I have mod points but since there's no 'Depressing' option, I'll have to settle with a reply.
absolutely (Score:4, Funny)
Absolutely a game changer. In fact, I got a real charge out of reading about them. The current methods are terminal. I was much more depressed before reading about these things. I think the technology really has potential. Hopefully they will cell, but they might have to amp up the advertising.
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I am usually resistant to change, but your enthusiasm has transformed my thinking. I don't want to draw any hasty conclusions, but this has the capacity to lead to good things.
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Re:Hopefully not vaporware. (Score:5, Interesting)
Lithium-air is, IMHO, one of the least promising upcoming battery techs. It's really more like a fuel cell, and to be blunt, fuel cells suck. By that, I mean:
* Expensive per watt
* Short lifespans
* Inefficient
There are many, many promising next-gen battery techs other than li-air. Here's just a couple of my favorites.
Lithium-sulfur: This has long been worked on, but only just recently one of its big problems has been worked around. It offers great energy density, but some of the intermediary reaction products -- various lithium polysulfides -- are rather soluble. They'd migrate across the membrane and precipitate out on the other side, being rendered permanently useless to the reaction and thus aging the cells very quickly. Older solutions to try to prevent this caused dramatically lower energy density. The latest technique involves wicking the sulfur into the pores of mesoporous carbon and then functionalizing the outside of the carbon with polyethylene glycol to keep the hydrophobic polysulfides inside when they form. The longevity improvements were amazing, without sacrificing energy density. We're talking that when they deliberately chose a worst-case solvent, one that's really good at dissolving polysulfides, the traditional Li-S cell lost 96% of its sulfur in 30 cycles while theirs only lost 25%.
Nickel-lithium: It is, quite literally, a hybrid NiMH/li-ion battery -- a traditional NiMH cathode that can hold a tremendous amount of lithium, and a lithium metal anode (almost obscene anode energy density). That's normally impossible, since you want to run a NiMH battery with an aqueous electrolyte and your various lithium-based cells with an organic electrolyte. They do both -- they use a new tech called a LISICON membrane to keep the two different electrolytes apart but allow lithium ions across. An additional problem with li metal anodes is that dendrites tend to form that rupture the membrane -- but LISICON membranes are a rigid ceramic that resists dendrite damage.
Digital quantum battery: This is my favorite, because it comes straight out of left field. It's really a type of capacitor. Now, capacitors normally hold a lot less energy than batteries; if the voltage gets too high, you get dielectric breakdown, it arcs across, and your energy is lost. But at very tiny scales, current must move as quanta. So if instead of a single big capacitor, you lithographically print an array of nanoscale capacitors, all of the sudden you can make it so that you essentially can't get dielectric breakdown. In fact, you can store so much energy that the stresses become so great that it's best to use a carbon nanotube for one of the electrodes in each nano-capacitor. :)
And even ignoring next-gen battery techs, there is still *huge* range for improvement in li-ion. In particular, for the cathodes, my favorites are layered manganese cathodes which alternate long-life forms and high energy density forms of magnanese oxides to get both properties; and fluorinated metal cathodes. For the anodes, there's many kinds of tin and particularly silicon anodes out there that store nearly an order of magnitude more lithium than conventional graphite anodes. Silicon anode li-ion cells are just this month starting to hit the market. The tech has finally matured to the point where their longevity is sufficient.
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Parent is Informative. Mods?
This post is Insightful. Or at least Funny, in a sad, "iPad" kind of way.
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Um... huh?
Could you elaborate?
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The latest technique involves wicking the sulfur into the pores of mesoporous carbon and then functionalizing the outside of the carbon with polyethylene glycol to keep the hydrophobic polysulfides inside when they form.
I got a little bit hard right there.
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Rei, I'd be interested to see your response to viking80's comment [slashdot.org] further down the page - I'll quote it here:
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I did respond to it. What he wrote was complete pseudoscientific nonsense.
Re:Hopefully not vaporware. (Score:4, Funny)
Lithium-air is, IMHO, one of the least promising upcoming battery techs.
Uh-huh. But between this and all the alternatives you mention, which would Michael Jordan endorse?
That's right.
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Lithium-air is, IMHO, one of the least promising upcoming battery techs. It's really more like a fuel cell, and to be blunt, fuel cells suck. By that, I mean:
* Expensive per watt
* Short lifespans
* Inefficient
There are many, many promising next-gen battery techs other than li-air. Here's just a couple of my favorites.
You seem very knowledgeable. Which is to say, you've easily surpassed my ignorant bullshit detector on the subject matter. ;) Perhaps you'd care to speculate, wildly even, as to why big names such as IBM and the DOE would will be willing to heavily invest so many cycles into Lithium-air if the base technology sucks so badly. Does the fact that they're willing to invest in this technology hint they have some significant reasons to believe this technology trumps existing efforts? Or is it possible the applica
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's the same reason why companies invested in fuel cells -- a long-term hail mary pass. Certainly li-air beats all of the techs mentioned (with the possible exception of digital quantum batteries) in terms of energy density. But it has huge challenges that may or may not be able to be met. Probably not. And yes, there is (or at least was) little patent coverage in that arena.
Also note that batteries aren't only about electric cars. This is IBM we're talking about here. Think laptops and cell phones:
Recharge time? (Score:2)
For a battery of this capacity what kinds of charging time are we talking here? I know that the standard electric cars are something around 6-8 hours. To maintain an 8 hour charge time for something like that the current draw is going to have to be pretty darn high. I don't know if charging a car like this is realistic. Of course, you wouldn't need to give it a full charge every night for most people.
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Full charge of a Tesla Roadster, which has a 250 mile range, takes 3.5 hours on a 240 volt circuit at 70 amps. So yes, at quickest supported charging rate, the amperage is quite substantial. Many residential homes in the US have 100 amp service. 200 amp service is probably a good idea for Roadster owners. Charging a lithium-air battery pack with double the capacity might take 7 hours. But it could vary considerably from that guess because battery charge times differ depending on the chemistry and nanos
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> Many residential homes in the US have 100 amp service.
Most have 200. 400 is usually available at extra cost.
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The house I just moved into had a 60A fuse.... Needless to say the owner and I took a saturday and upgraded it to 200A with breakers!
Re:Recharge time? (Score:5, Informative)
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Most have 200. 400 is usually available at extra cost.*"
*citation need
Got it right here, says [answers.com] you're [yahoo.com] wrong [answerbag.com]
New construction homes get 200 amp, but even as recent as 2006 builders were providing 100 amp and 200 amp as an upgrade. [allexperts.com] This electrician in Wisconsin recommends 100 amps for house under 2,000 sq/ft [romanelectric.com]. I don't exactly know date when 200 amp became the standard for new construction but it's clear 100 amp is the norm for your average pr
Re:Recharge time? (Score:5, Informative)
8 hour charge for how many miles? I don't know about you, but my daily commute isn't 600 miles.
It's level 1 or level 2 charging at home, and level 3 or higher for long trips. And that's what it's going to be for probably the next century. It doesn't make sense to do it any other way. You only need fast charges when you're taking long trips, so you need fast charging stations available on the road. Around home, you want slow charging, which is gentler on the batteries (and, not to mention, the grid), as well as being more efficient.
By the way, for those who are curious:
Level 1: ~110V, 20A or less. US standard: SAE J1772 or the ever-common NEMA 5-15 plug.
Level 2: ~220V, 80A or less. US standard: SAE J1772. European standard: Mennekes, based on IEC 60309.
Level 3: ~440V, up to "hundreds" of amps. No official standard, but the TESCO connector seems to be becoming dominant.
The most powerful EV charger I'm aware of is an 800kW charger created by Aerovironment for TARDEC. That's ~800V and ~1000A, if I recall correctly. It's about the size of four vending machines pushed together.
Re:Recharge time? (Score:4, Informative)
It all depends on the discharge/charge ratings for the cells. We regularly punish Li cells in hotliner electric gliders.
For example, a 1,000mAH Li-Ion cell with a 5C charge rating can be safely charged at 5,000mA from near flat in 10 to 12 minutes. The charge ratings tend to go down as cell sizes increase, though, due to ventilation issues - you just can't dissipate the heat from the battery packs quickly enough unless you involve forced-flow systems, and if it gets too hot you'll get a runaway situation and BOOM.
Overstated (Score:5, Interesting)
Current plug-in vehicles? Like, what a Chevy Volt or a hacked Prius? Nonsense. Try a Tesla Roadster, with a single charge range of 250 miles. Lithium-air might double the range then. But a factor of 5? No.
I do have one question though. How are lithium-ion batteries affected by increasing cell size? The Tesla Roadster currently uses a ridiculous number of very small cells in its pack, in a move that looks dictated by ridiculous patent licensing terms limiting cell sizes to those suitable for laptops in an effort to prevent the existence of something like the Roadster. That's what it looks like. But is there a technical reason to limit cell size? There is surprisingly little information available about how the performance of lithium cells change as they get physically larger (or smaller).
Re:Overstated (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Overstated (Score:5, Informative)
The person who responded to you first is indeed correct. It's not about patents; you're mixing up this with the old EV1 debacle. The Roadster uses 18650-format cobalt/graphite li-ion cells, which are already in mass production. They did this for obvious reasons; when they started out, the phosphates and spinels that everyone else is now using weren't really available.
As for fire, which the previous person commented on, each cell is contained within its own can that's designed to isolate failures to just that cell. It's a pretty complex pack indeed. Future EVs won't have such a complex pack. It's doubtful that even the Model S will, even though it's still going to be based on cobalt tech (that's what Tesla has experience with, after all -- and despite all its downsides, it is quite energy dense)
If you're curious as to how the pack is structured, there are 11 "sheets", each one made of 9 "bricks", and each of those made of 69 cells. Each of the cells in a brick are wired in parallel. The failure of one, therefore, has relatively little impact on the performance of the brick. The bricks and sheets are wired in series. Each sheet monitors the performance of all of its bricks and does load balancing on them, as well as logging failures. It's a pretty impressive piece of engineering.
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Can the US Gov hold patents? Is that legal?
If anything, I'd say it will either be unencumbered by patents (some open license format) in the best case, or IBM will get some kind of limited patent as part of their "cut."
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> Can the US Gov hold patents?
It can and does.
Fingers Crossed (Score:3, Interesting)
Energy-dense storage media have been the missing link in a lot of relatively clean energy generation schemes. For example, both solar and wind power are challenged by the need to store power for when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.
Re:Fingers Crossed (Score:4, Insightful)
> Energy-dense storage media have been the missing link in a lot of relatively
> clean energy generation schemes.
It isn't density that matters there. It's cost.
Recharge time and price bigger issue (Score:3, Insightful)
Tbh with the Tesla breaking 500km the main obstacle for Electric Vehicles is no longer storage capacity of the batteries but rather the recharge time and battery price. LiFeP batteries have short recharge times ( 5 minuets or so ) and are starting to come down in price, so the big issue right now is designing an electric interface that can safely deliver the 200kW or so that would be needed to charge the a Tesla-equivalent 50kWh battery pack in less than 15 minutes. The standard proposed in Europe supports up to 43kW so there's some way to go still, but theoretically if you just developed the EU's proposal to support 100kW then using 2 cables would get you down to a 15min charge time.
It's a bit of an engineering problem to make such an interface safe for the average commuter to use, but it seems to me it is now fairly clear that batteries will be future energy carrier for personal cars. Hydrogen no longer has any advantages over batteries since it is has a low energy efficiency and even worse refueling problems than electrics, not to mention the infrastructure challenges. There is still no good way to produce biofuel at the scales required, and even if you could you would have to set up a new infrastructure from scratch, and they would likely still result in more pollution than the batteries. With fast charging batteries on the market now flywheels have also lost their advantage of being able to "charge" very rapidly and their low energy density and high cost makes them unlikely.
Basically eventually battery price will come down enough, and the Oil price will rise high enough, that electric vehicles will be cheaper than petrol. It's now just a matter of time, maybe just a few decades, before the majority of cars produced will be electric.
Re:Recharge time and price bigger issue (Score:4, Interesting)
But how are you going to distribute the power? My house gets 100A at 250V so thats 25000 watts. I doubt the cable in the street can supply that to each house at the same time (car charging time) when the electric stoves are cooking dinner as well. For 100kw we need four times that so at best we need to double the diameter of every cable running along every street and push back higher peak current requirements into the distribution system as well.
I think we are going to need to charge more for high current delivery on top of high energy delivery to encourage slow overnight charging, otherwise the networks and generators won't be able to cope with the demand.
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never underestimate the construction capability of people motivated by profit and funded by capitalists
Are these the same type of capitalists taking a 24 million computer-hour handout from the government?
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A more distributed system would be better and easily adapted in the current infrastructure. Imagine each parking spot in a mall with a plug where you are charged for the energy received while you shop (like Red Box for electricity instead of dvds). Similar for places of employment (cost could be factored into salaries). A high-watt short time facility would only be necessary for long
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If you live in the US the Electric line that supplies your home is probably a 7kv but stepdown isn't much of an issue as I understand most of the power lines in the US that are modern (defined as last 30 years) are sized sufficiently to support up to 45kv with the transmission lines upwards of 100kv. At those voltages millions of amps can be delivered safely to the transformer that feeds your home. The problem isn't going to be distribution, it's going to be generation.
The annual energy usage of automobiles
Re:Recharge time and price bigger issue (Score:5, Informative)
The annual energy usage of automobiles is more than the current electricity usage in the US.
True but grossly misleading. :) The average car has a tank-to-wheel average efficiency in normal combined city/highway driving of about 20%. Your average li-ion electric vehicle has a plug-to-wheel average efficiency under the same conditions of about 85%.
The reality is that almost no new generating capacity is needed [pnl.gov].
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There are two problems with what you wrote.
1) You compared the *fuel* used in gasoline cars to *electricity* generated, not to the *fuel* used to generate that electricity. So generation losses were already factored into the equation, but gasoline losses were not.
2) Power plants are more efficient than cars. Even coal plants in the US average 32% efficient (higher in Europe). NG baseload plants average about 42%. And transmission losses are tiny (92.8% average efficiency).
Re:Recharge time and price bigger issue (Score:4, Informative)
Coal plants can and do back off their generation at times of low demand. Typically they can go down to about 50-60% capacity without problems. You're correct in the general concept that they don't switch off and on quickly, but they certainly don't generate at max capacity 24/7.
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When was the last large power plant built in the US? I think it was in the 1970s. NIMBY rules all here and we are going to see major brownouts and electricity rationing before you see a big power plant built. Coal or nuclear are about it, with wind and solar suitable for adding some extra around the edges.
Just about every power plant that has been built in the last 40 years or so is a natural gas fired "peaker" plant designed to operate only in times of extreme load. Of course, they are all running 24x7
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And you feel the need to charge at that rate *at home* why....? Do you have a 500 mile commute?
I only ever need rapid refill capability in my vehicle when taking trips, but perhaps your life is different.
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In fact I see little use for fast charging, except as an excuse to keep petrol (gas) stations in business. I plug my phone, laptop and music player in at night and I would be fine doing that with a car. The post I responded to discussed fast charging and ways to make that safe for normal people to use. I took that to be discussing charging in the home.
Personally I think we will see most urban commuters charging overnight at home, and some in high rise car parks. For long highway trips petrol stations on hig
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That's the secret Achilles heel of electric cars - and one that the electric car industry and their boosters have been steadfastly trying to pretend doesn't exist. Widespread usage of electric cars is going to require trillions of dollars in infrastructure upgrades and strain our existing generation and transport systems.
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But only if we insist on fast charging at any time of day. And that requirement is a hang over from the way we manage petrol powered cars. Once we get used to plugging the car in when we are home (which is most of the time for most people) and charging slowly, then the load on the network should be less of an issue. Negotiation between the supply and the load will help as well.
Don't recharge; swap! (Score:2)
The difficulty of delivering such a large amount of power in such a short time would be bypassed if the battery packs were designed to be easily swapped in and out.
Re:"...just a matter of time" (Score:2)
Only if you ignore the worldwide copper shortage...
Silly question... (Score:2)
...But what exactly are they planning to accomplish with a supercomputer? What exactly are they looking for? Can they somehow brute-force search different models looking for ones that work?
And why can't they use a cloud instead? LiAir@Home FTW!
Mining in outerspace? (Score:2)
Also, last I heard was precious meant expensive and rare...
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Last I heard was lithium was a precious metal--and 50% of the world's sources were in one country (So Am).
Also, last I heard was precious meant expensive and rare...
Some quick googling suggests a price around $6000 per ton of lithium carbonate, which would contain about 100 kg of lithium. So call it $60 per kg.
I would consider silver to be the entry-level "precious" metal. It's currently trading around $17 per troy oz, or about $550 per kg.
Therefore your girlfriend won't be very impressed when you give her that lithium engagement ring.
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She'll be particularly unimpressed when it turns her finger black. And then the finger falls off.
Re:Mining in outerspace? (Score:4, Informative)
Nope.
Lithium is plentiful, you can mine it from seawater indefinitely for about $60 per kg. It's just that some countries can supply lithium at smaller prices.
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> It's just that some countries can supply lithium at smaller prices.
But only slightly smaller. Lithium is fairly uniformly distributed throughout the Earth's crust. It is, of course, cheapest to mine it where the concentration is a bit higher than average, but as those concentrations are not all that high compared to the average the countries that own them aren't going to get rich from them. If they try to jack up the price whoever they are trying to hold up will just start mining it at home.
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> Last I heard was lithium was a precious metal...
You last heard wrong. It goes for around $100/kg, less than 1/4 the price of silver.
> ...50% of the world's sources were in one country (So Am).
Chile seems to currently have the largest proven reserves, but lithium is not very rare (similar in concentration in the Earth's crust to nickel and lead) and is widely distributed.
I'm holding out for 1000 miles per charge (Score:2)
I'm holding out for 1000 miles per charge, and no, I am not being facetious. I think THAT will be the real game changer, and here's why:
One thousand miles is pretty much the limit on what you can drive in one day - that's getting on the Interstate and just rolling, with minimal stops, for about 12 hours. I don't know about anybody else, but I find that's pretty much the limit for me.
Now, let us consider a car with 400 mile per charge range - that's about what most gas or diesel cars can get on a tank of fue
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On the other hand, Hollywood gets to put Lithium Air batteries into Pintos, creating an awesome thrill ride that will garner at least 4 stars by any reputable movie review site.
Re:looks like another pinto car (Score:5, Insightful)
> They use highly flammable metals to do this so we will have another round of
> explosive cars out on the highways...
Anything that packs enough energy to run a car 300 miles into the volume of a gas tank is going to be potentially dangerous. There's no way around it.
> ...and being metals they will require some thought into the use of water to
> put the flames out at accidents.
Whereas water works real well on gasoline fires.
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Yeah, really explosive [egmcartech.com]. And those are cobalt-based cells, the kind that everyone worries about but which are not used in most EVs (just Tesla and Tesla-derivatives).
How much worse of an accident do you get than one in which you end up with an SUV sitting on top of your car and your battery pack fully bashed in?
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And unlike gasoline, there's no need to pump lithium around the car, so the risk of fire is much lower assuming adequate tank protection from puncture damage. With electric, instead of needing to protect a significant portion of the car from overheating or puncture damage, you only have a single compartment to protect, and that's typically underneath the vehicle.
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Re:looks like another pinto car (Score:4, Informative)
Rare earth elements consist of the f-block metals. The first column s-block metals Li, Na, K, Rb and Cs are all alkali metals. Lithium is actually the least reactive metal of the column. Potassium catches fire on exposure to water and Caesium essentially explodes on contact.
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If _eBikes_ are the way forward, no big auto makers need be involved in their production.
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Anyone get the feeling that airborne lithium will soon be a pollution concern? At least with all that lithium around, depression should be a thing of the past!
Great, along with lithium's side effect of "decreased sperm motility", you can cue the conspiracy theorists that the government is funding a population-control device.
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No, no they couldn't.
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Great, along with lithium's side effect of "decreased sperm motility", you can cue the conspiracy theorists
You realize that for a start, lithium is a naturally occurring trace element, right? Now as far as I know, I haven't heard of a great deal of sterility in Argentina or China or Australia, where the world's largest lithium concentrations are found. Certainly there are no weird mutants to be seen - well, no weirder than anywhere else.
Now considering the limited
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Anyone get the feeling that airborne lithium will soon be a pollution concern?
Not really. Lithium is so reactive, you won't find any "airborne lithium". Only lithium oxide. Which will react with the water vapor in the air to produce lithium hydroxide. Which will react with CO2 to produce lithium carbonate which, like most carbonates, is not very soluble. Most of it will precipitate out of solution, and the rest will make us feel less depressed.
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But you don't need heavy gas engine in electric car...
Also, there are denser energy storage mediums than gasoline. Some are practical (diesel), some are not (lithium hydride + fluorine).
Re:Gasoline's energy density is a fundamental limi (Score:5, Informative)
Gasoline at 50MJ/kg is pretty much the most dense energy storage possible in this universe excluding nuclear energy.
Not even close. For example, beryllium blows it away in both volumetric and gravimetric energy density (and hydrogen blows beryllium out of the water in gravimetric comparisons, but sucks at volumetric). And comparing any of them to nuclear energy is laughable.
This is kind of a fundamental limit as to how much energy can be stored in *any* system using potential energy of the electric field of matter.
No, it isn't. Nor is beryllium. Energy doesn't even have to be stored in chemical bonds (see, for example, digital quantum batteries).
You may get 2x better efficiency in an electric motor,
Try 4x in typical driving conditions.
but I can not see how a battery can approach this value.
It doesn't need to. A motor the size of a watermelon propels the Tesla Roadster from 0-60 in under 4 seconds. In gasoline cars, the fuel is light and the engine is heavy. In EVs, the motor is light and the "fuel" (the battery pack) is heavy. It's a reversed paradigm. You have to compare the mass and volume of the engine + fuel to the mass and volume of motor + fuel. And with current battery tech, you'll find that EVs are about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way to matching gasoline cars. But batteries have increased nearly 5-fold in energy density the past 21 years, and show no signs of stopping.
Re:Gasoline's energy density is a fundamental limi (Score:4, Interesting)
Not even close. For example, beryllium blows it away in both volumetric and gravimetric energy density (and hydrogen blows beryllium out of the water in gravimetric comparisons, but sucks at volumetric).
Hydrogen was included in TFA comparison.
No, it isn't. Nor is beryllium. Energy doesn't even have to be stored in chemical bonds (see, for example, digital quantum batteries).
Energy is still stored in the electrical field in matter. A quantum battery needs a lot of infrastructure to handle the forces, so at least 50% of the weight will be wasted. (compare to the weight of a clamp holding a spring.)
Try 4x in typical driving conditions.
No, A small VW diesel has up to 40% efficiency. An elelctric car may have 90%, but you can only use 60% of the battery without damaging it in a few cycles, so overall, 2x is conservative.
It doesn't need to. A motor the size of a watermelon propels the Tesla Roadster from 0-60 in under 4 seconds. In gasoline cars, the fuel is light and the engine is heavy. In EVs, the motor is light and the "fuel" (the battery pack) is heavy. It's a reversed paradigm. You have to compare the mass and volume of the engine + fuel to the mass and volume of motor + fuel. And with current battery tech, you'll find that EVs are about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way to matching gasoline cars. But batteries have increased nearly 5-fold in energy density the past 21 years, and show no signs of stopping.
You are partially correct. A brushless electric motor can have very high intermittent power density. maybe 10x of a gas engine. It is only limited by cooling. For continous power its power density is the same as a gas engine. Maybe a hybrid combination can beat either. It is actually quite complicated to cool an electric motor. Think 100kW power, and 10kW heat. That means liquid cooling with pumps. radiators, and a much bigger motor to accommodate water cooling. Find an electric motor that had higher energy density than a gas engine for continous output, and I will stand corrected, and learn something new.
Here is a 220kg gas engine rated for 200kW continuous and 330kW peak: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_993#Turbo_S [wikipedia.org]
Re:Gasoline's energy density is a fundamental limi (Score:5, Informative)
Not even close. For example, beryllium blows it away in both volumetric and gravimetric energy density (and hydrogen blows beryllium out of the water in gravimetric comparisons, but sucks at volumetric).
Hydrogen was included in TFA comparison.
Nice try at changing the subject away from the fact that you're quite simply wrong about gasoline being the most energy-dense or nearly most energy dense substance in the universe. It's not even close. If you really want to find the most energy dense chemicals, you need to look at metastable solids. Cubane and nitrogen rings, for example. And there are some theoretical ones that may be even higher, such as triplet helium. These things way, way outclass gasoline in terms of energy density.
Energy is still stored in the electrical field in matter. A quantum battery needs a lot of infrastructure to handle the forces, so at least 50% of the weight will be wasted. (compare to the weight of a clamp holding a spring.)
1) "Still"? Chemical batteries don't store energies in electrical fields.
2) You're trying to bond energy released in a chemical reaction with tensile strength. Tensile strength != energy. And no, they're not related. A beryllium cord has a *lot* less tensile strength than a carbon nanotube cord (orders of magnitude), but releases significantly more energy when it burns.
No, A small VW diesel has up to 40% efficiency.
"Up to" != "Average usage". Duh. Diesel cars average about 25% efficiency in typical mixed usage. Engines only get their peak efficiency within a narrow power band.
An elelctric car may have 90%, but you can only use 60% of the battery without damaging it in a few cycles, so overall, 2x is conservative.
Wrong on so many different levels.
1) Efficiency has nothing to do with pack capacity. You're equating the two. 90% *efficiency*. Versus 20% *efficiency*.
2) The Tesla Roadster uses over 90% of its pack's capacity. Most li-ion BEVs are in the 75-90% DoD range. Not 60%. The Volt uses 50%, but only because A) they're taking an extremely conservative approach, and B) it's a small-pack PHEV.
You are partially correct. A brushless electric motor can have very high intermittent power density. maybe 10x of a gas engine. It is only limited by cooling. For continous power its power density is the same as a gas engine.
First off, you're confusing DC and AC motors. All AC motors are brushless. Brushless is a category of DC motors. Secondly, no. The Tesla Roadster can do anything but track duty without a liquid cooling system. With a liquid system it could easily due track duty. And even with just air cooling, it beats the hell out of non-sports cars in sustained power output, despite having an engine much smaller than even non-sports-cars that run on gasoline. And furthermore, how important is track duty to the average person?
It is actually quite complicated to cool an electric motor.
No. You can buy motors with the cooling already in place.
Think 100kW power, and 10kW heat.
First off, 100kW power is something you'll only ever get during very high acceleration or extremely high speeds. Cruising power is more like 10kW, meaning 1kW heat. Secondly, since gasoline cars average about 20% net efficiency, 100kW of gasoline power output equals *80* kW of heat that you need to get rid of. It's much, much easier for the EV.
Find an electric motor that had higher energy density than a gas engine for continous output, and I will stand corrected, and learn something new.
The very one we're talking about. The Roadster's motor can do 2/3rds of its peak output as sustained. And peak output does 0-60 in under 4 seconds.
Note that the Roadster's motor is hardly the most power dense electric motor out there. Look at the PML Flightlink in-wheel motors used in the Lightning GT, for example. Each in-wheel motor is rated for 120kW peak and are.. well, the size of a wheel.
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One of the many reasons we don't burn it in our cars ;)
I often like to joke, when people boast about the sort of mileage they get in their diesel cars and don't seem to understand that diesel is a denser fuel than gasoline and has a lot more pollution emitted per gallon, that I could modify my car to burn a fine beryllium slurry and easily get over 100mpg, and wow, wouldn't that be an eco-car -- 100mpg, right? :)
Not all fuels are created equal. ;)
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The issue here, is how much of the 50MJ/kg is actually converted into mechanical energy via the combustion process, and how much of it is expelled as waste thermal energy out of the tail pipe, and leaked out of the metal skin of the engine?
Since an electric engine is not a thermal engine, it does not have to obey carnot efficiency. Nearly all of the thermal loss comes directly from the resistance of the materials in the battery pack, and in the coil windings and power leads to the motor.
The pedant will arg
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Gasoline has a lot of energy per volume, no doubt. But an IC engine has a maximum efficiency burning that gasoline of about 40%, real world efficiency is around 20%. Electric motors are 90% real world efficient. Now assuming your 50MJ/kg is correct, all your battery has to do is match 11MJ/kg and it will equal gasoline assuming everything is equal. As noted in another post its not equal, the electric motor weighs almost nothing compared to the IC engine, as a result you need even less energy. According to t
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Electric energy can propel your car for $0.03 per mile. If gas taxes were taken out (I used my states gas tax, yours could be several cents different either direction), you are paying roughly $2.30 per gallon and if you car gets 35mph per gallon you are paying $0.06 cents per mile, that's HALF the cost.
$2.30 per gallon is dirt cheap, compared to prices here (Belgium). Gasoline here is about €1.40 per liter, that's almost $2 per liter or roughly $7.50 per gallon. The difference in electricity prices is much smaller: with a separate installation that works only during the night you can charge your car at €0.09 per kWh. Regular daytime prices are around €0.18. Judging from this list [doe.gov], that's not too different from prices in the U.S. ($0.0764 in North Dakota, $0.2028 in Connecticut, $0.2379 in H
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All rocket fuels and explosives are much worse. Typically 10% of gas. This is mostly due to the fact that these fuels must include the oxidizer, i.e. oxygen. But even excluding that, they are worse than gas. TNT, one of the best explosives, have 8MJ/kg, the same as household garbage. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density/ [wikipedia.org]
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