Company Builds Fast Charging Station For Electric Cars 359
thecarchik writes "Japanese based JFE Engineering has released its ultra-fast charge station. Designed to comply with the CHAdeMo standard developed by Tokyo Electric Power Company, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Subaru and Toyota, the system is capable of charging a 2011 Mitsubishi i-Miev from empty to 50% full in just three minutes. Even just three minutes plugged into the fast-charge station was enough to enable a standard 2011 Mitsubishi i-Miev to travel a further 50 miles before further charging was required."
Re:Some quick math says... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would be inclined to stand back before switching the power on. And I don't think I would leave the kids in the car during the charging operation.
Re:Still skeptical about all-electric cars (Score:5, Insightful)
I have never owned or even driven one save for a golf cart. My experience with the golf cart leaves me doubt as to whether an electric car can deliver enough torque to climb steep inclines.
Have you tried a Tesla? I hear they are fast.
Heck, what happens when you are stuck in snow all the while, the spinning of wheels eating away at your juice? Scary, isn't it?
Heck, what happens when you are stuck in snow all the while, the spinning of wheels eating away at your fuel? Scary, isn't it?
Re:I'll wave when I drive past you ... (Score:5, Insightful)
they lack the range to be useful outside of a commuter scenario
And that scenario only makes up, what, about 80% of the passenger car miles driven in North America?
Re:Still skeptical about all-electric cars (Score:4, Insightful)
Heck, what happens when you are stuck in snow all the while, the spinning of wheels eating away at your fuel? Scary, isn't it?
When stuck in snow, the need to keep warm and therefore keep the engine running consumes fuel. When you finally run out of gasoline, you can replenish your supply via some container. How the heck do you do that if your primary source of energy if a battery? This is the problem.
Re:Still skeptical about all-electric cars (Score:5, Insightful)
My experience with the golf cart leaves me doubt as to whether an electric car can deliver enough torque to climb steep inclines.
Er, what? When dealing with electric motors, you have much more torque than a comparable gas motor.
Re:I'll wave when I drive past you ... (Score:3, Insightful)
The way to make a hydrogen car viable is to take your nth generation series hybrid car and replace the engine/generator with a hydrogen fuel cell. Once you are mainly using electricity off the grid, you only need to refill your gas tank occasionally, since you are only doing it every now and again, going to a hydrogen dispensary is less of an issue, even if there isn't one right around the corner. As hydrogen/electric cars become more palatable, hydrogen fuelling plants become more common, eventually you don't need as big of a battery to get between them.
A migration path is key. series hybrid cars let companies experiment with different supplimental energy sources without producing vehicles completely dependent on some external infrastructure.
Heck, I'd like to see a 'standard' for pluggable electric generators in series hybrid cars, pull out the diesel engine, replace it with a hydrogen fuel cell, or a bigger battery pack, or just leave it out and have a pure electric car.
Re:Some quick math says... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Still skeptical about all-electric cars (Score:4, Insightful)
Extreme environments pose challenges for vehicles. There are examples you can point to where EVs may not be appropriate. But say I want to camp in the desert. The nearest petrol station is 1000km away. I could use a bank of photocells to charge my vehicle on site.
And BTW 1000km is quite realistic for remote areas in my country.
Re:Cold fusion (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh and you math geeks, figure out how many pounds of coal was burned to charge that battery halfway.
How about none? I'm not a huge fan of nuclear power, but guess what runs the grid in much of Japan?
Re:I'll wave when I drive past you ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Still too slow, Hydrogen is endgame (Score:3, Insightful)
Even three minutes is a long time to spend actually at the charger, and as another poster noted that produces a hell of a load on the electrical grid which limits the practicality of deployment for further speed improvements in charging.
I saw an article a bit ago doing the math about how many cars can move through a electric equivalent of a gas station, and something like 10x more gasoline powered cars are able to fuel up FULLY over the course of an hour. And of course if you are only charging for 50 miles station congestion will only be worse.
Purely electric cars are simply not a practical thing, and really don't mesh well with how people like to use cars in America.
That's why I think the alternative fuel of choice will (and should) be Hydrogen. People (consumers and stations and providers) already know how to deal with liquids, it's just an adaptation of existing infrastructure.
Yes it's bloody hard to store and expensive to produce right now. But imagine how much less so it would be (especially production) if the same amount of money were being poured into R&D around Hydrogen cars as we see being poured into electric and solar power.
Re:I'll wave when I drive past you ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Cold fusion (Score:3, Insightful)
Electric engines are roughly 3-4 times as efficient as gasoline ones. So you get 3-4 times the effective energy density out of batteries.
Please explain what you mean. Your premise and conclusion are not related, which makes your statement completely nonsensical.
More importantly you don't need that much energy, almost all car rides are short and electricity can be recharged at home unlike gasoline.
And if that were the issue, we wouldn't even be discussing it. I can already get electric cars that are completely useful and practical for short trips around town, so that the car spends most of its time at home charging. The problem is that none of them are any good at all for leaving town, since there's no available means to recharge them easily, quickly, or without special arrangements.
Less pollution wise than you'd get from gasoline, someone did look into it. Natural gas is a lot better, and used in quite a few places, but even coal beats out gasoline engines.
Citation, please. Adding generation losses, transmission losses, DC conversion losses, battery storage losses, and drivetrain losses to compare it to the total efficiency of an internal combustion engine is a nontrivial thing. Just because some dude on Slashdot assures me that "someone did look into it" does not at all make me satisfied that reality is in any way supportive of the claim.
Re:Cold fusion (Score:5, Insightful)
I imagine they're also very efficient at annoying the neighbors with the noise.
Re:Some quick math says... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would be inclined to stand back before switching the power on. And I don't think I would leave the kids in the car during the charging operation.
But you're happy to have your kids in a car while you fill it up with 50 liters of some toxic and highly flammable liquid or even gas.
You don't have to heat the fuel tank to do that.
Re:Cold fusion (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, but who wants to buy a car that only gets 100 miles, then needs to be recharged every 50 miles?
I do! My work is located ~15miles from my home and I could charge the car (for free!) all day while I'm working. A car which could go ~100 miles would cover almost all my personal transportation needs (not only to and from work), and if I would need to go longer I could rent or borrow another car (or take a bus / cab).
Re:Cold fusion (Score:3, Insightful)
A better way to put it, Would you be willing to take a 3~5minute break every 3hours of driving? To help the environment? I think that is a fairly minor lifestyle change at this point.
Another point is that there is a world outside of the US. Newcastle to London is 300mi; Rome to Modena. In many places 300mi is horribly excessive. Hell, all of Ireland is 150mi across.
Anyways I think the Volt is an amazing transition vehicle until infrastructure gets in place... eventually people will no longer feel the need to shell out x dollars for the turbine and it'll fade away.
Re:Still too slow, Hydrogen is endgame (Score:3, Insightful)
But all of that is mitigated by the fact that you can charge at home.
For the daily commute with an electric, most people wouldn't even have to stop at a gas (electricity?) station.
If you imaging only 10% of the people would be using the station to recharge, then the usage would be pretty similar to that of the current gas stations.
The weekends could be worse, though.
Re:Cold fusion (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cold fusion (Score:4, Insightful)
Whereas 90% of journeys have 1 adult and no luggage.
Re:Cold fusion (Score:3, Insightful)
There are more people in NYC metro area (NYC, northern new Jersey, eastern CT) then there are in Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Idaho, and Alaska combined....
Re:Cold fusion (Score:3, Insightful)
Electric cars will fail, and series hybrids like the Chevy Volt will succeed. [wikipedia.org] When the batteries run low a gas generator keeps the batteries charged enough to power the vehicle. This is brilliant: I get my electric car for my short daily commutes, but I still have gas for those rare times when I need to drive hundreds of miles in a day. I have the best of both worlds with no sacrifices..
And all those other times when you are not driving 100 miles in a day you are lugging around a heavy and useless generator. That you paid good money for. And when you are driving more than 100 miles a day, you are lugging around huge battery packs that are doing very little good (outside of some regenerative braking and acceleration boost which are negligible on the Interstate at a constant speed.) It sounds to me like the worst of both worlds. I think I would rather have a small all electric car to get me to work on a daily basis and a large gas SUV for longer trips (and it would be great if I could just rent the SUV when I needed it.)
And no, you cannot get anywhere close to 80% efficiency with gas-in, electricty out turbines.
Re:Cold fusion (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'll wave when I drive past you ... (Score:3, Insightful)
And exactly what charges your batteries ?
Hint : probably electricity from a coal-fired lower plant.
That's a stupid argument because the solution is obvious: use wind, hydro, solar or nuclear energy to charge the vehicle.
For gasoline engines, no clean solution exists at all.
Re:Cold fusion (Score:2, Insightful)
So you are suggesting that a vehicle built for people living in NYC is a single solution appropriate for the rest of the country too?
I've often said that people living in New York think that the western border of America appears on the Hudson River. New Jersey is a foreign country and the rest of America might as well not exist. Sentiments like this tend to make that kind of statement seem all that more appropriate.
Of those that I've met who lived in NYC and then got out of that place to see the rest of America, most of them had to take driver's education when they left the Big Apple as the need for owning and operating your own private automobile simply wasn't there. An electric car vs. an internal combustion engine is not really a debate that is valid when neither is something that is being used.
I will note that California has an infrastructure that is largely built around an automobile, with three hour commutes (in each direction) quite common as well. I'll also note that California has more people than both the New York and Boston metro areas combined. Yeah, it can make a difference, and there are more people in the "rest" of the country than these two regions of America combined as well.
Re:Still too slow, Hydrogen is endgame (Score:3, Insightful)
So who will be taking old battery packs out of circulation then? Who pays for replacing them, and how?
You could just be buying and selling battery packs every time you refill. Over time, as a pack degrades, it becomes less valuable until eventually it's not usable by anyone who drives farther than the grocery store, and then not even them. At that point, the pack is being bought and sold for little more than its scrap value, so either the filling station or the vehicle owner may choose to scrap it.
The value of a battery pack has four components:
Given reliable ways to measure 1, 2 and 4, I think it would be possible to create a robust and fair market for battery packs. The biggest challenge would be establishing a system for valuing capacity. The problem is that it wouldn't be a linear -- a 100-mile capacity is worth more than twice as much as a 50-mile capacity, even ignoring the issue of capacity in future cycles. But you can't just establish a curve by fiat; it needs to be market-driven. If the battery valuation were based on a national battery market, and stations were required by regulation to use current exchange prices for battery purchases/sales (perhaps plus a small service charge), then stations would still be free to compete on the price of the energy they add to the batteries.
Too complicated to work? Maybe. Making it work at all requires having very reliable and standardized ways to measure current capacity and estimate future capacity. It's a possibility, though.
Re:I'll wave when I drive past you ... (Score:3, Insightful)