U.S. 5X Battery Research Sets Three Paths For Replacing Lithium 172
dcblogs writes "One year ago this month, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a $120 million plan to develop a technology capable of radically extending battery life. 'We want to change the game, basically,' said George Crabtree, a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and a physics professor who is leading the effort. The goal is to develop a battery that can deliver five times the performance, measured in energy density, that's also five times cheaper, and do it in five years. They are looking at three research areas. Researchers are considering replacing the lithium with magnesium that has two charges, or aluminum, which has three charges. Another approach investigates replacing the intercalation step with a true chemical reaction. A third approach is the use of liquids to replace crystalline anodes and cathodes, which opens up more space for working ions."
Awesome! (Score:2, Insightful)
Carbon Nanotubes (Score:3, Insightful)
What about Carbon nanotube Super Capacitors? MIT Nanotube Super Capacitor [peswiki.com]
Re:2x Lithium battery and cars still don't work (Score:2, Insightful)
OK, Lets use an Enerdel 12s block. 3000 cycles by 1300 watt-hours gets us 3.9 million watt-hour-cycles.
The cost is $711. So 3.9 million w-hr-cycles / $711 is 5485 w-hr-cycles per dollar. What is the w-hr-cycles of gasoline again?
Re:2x Lithium battery and cars still don't work (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, Lets use an Enerdel 12s block. 3000 cycles by 1300 watt-hours gets us 3.9 million watt-hour-cycles.
The cost is $711. So 3.9 million w-hr-cycles / $711 is 5485 w-hr-cycles per dollar. What is the w-hr-cycles of gasoline again?
That's an interesting question:
Gasoline gives us only one cycle.
$ units
You have: (114000 btu / gal) / (3$ / gal)
You want: W hr / $
* 11136.701
Sounds bad... but car engines are only about 20% efficient and electric cars are more like 80% efficient.
If we normalize that way, the gas car is 2227, and the batteries are 4388.
Looks like the batteries win, even with current temporary lull in gas prices.
Re:2x Lithium battery and cars still don't work (Score:5, Insightful)
In part, you are right. Batteries have to be competitive with traditional fuels. While some people may want EVs for "green" reasons that only they can understand, they do not represent any significant part of the market. I bought my car (Prius) not because I wanted to save the planet, but simply because I needed a new car, and Prius was a very good choice in many aspects - comfort (CVT rules!) and mieage, and reliability, and price, and cargo space, and passenger seats, and cost of service. Saving the planet? Not on my salary. Let Al Gore do that on his.
But moving pollution elsewhere, in itself, is not such a bad idea. First of all, even if the volume of pollution is unchanged, moving it away from cities helps already. However large power stations are more efficient, such as they produce less pollution per kWh of energy, compared to a car. It remains to be seen what effect the transmission losses have; but the losses are present in both cases; an ICE is not very efficient, and it is largely heating the Universe. At the same time, charging of an EV is not a lossless process either, and the batteries do not last forever - they contain polluting chemicals, and they need energy to be produced and recycled.
Remote power stations have yet another advantage - they can use cheaper or cleaner fuels. Coal is cheaper, and is plentiful. Sunlight, hydro, wind, geothermal, tide, etc. are cleaner. Those are options that you can exercise. You have no such options with gas-powered cars; they only can run on oil products by definition - and supply of oil is, apparently, limited.
Re:2x Lithium battery and cars still don't work (Score:5, Insightful)
Car engines may be more than 20% efficient in the best case, but in real world operation including idle and jack rabbit starts, probably not. That's why they introduced hybrids: you pay extra for some batteries in order to keep the engine closer to its theoretical maximum efficiency.
IIRC, the electricity to power a car is well under half the cost of gas per mile, especially if you meter it at off-peak hours. So it would still come out ahead. The car costs more to buy mainly because of the batteries, which is the cost that we were analyzing in the first place.
The limited range is probably the main show stopper for electric cars right now.
Sure there is! (Score:4, Insightful)
This is Slashdot, where it is trendy to hate on anything America does. Also there's the risk that the DoE might succeed (the DoE has some top research labs, Ames, Argonne, Fermi, Livermore, Los Alamos, NREL, Oak Ridge, Sandia, to name a few). In this case Argonne is leading the battery project, working with Berkley, PNNL, Sandia, and SLAC. There are also some public universities participating as well. So gotta get that hate in now!
As you say, the reality is that all this battery research is beneficial. Doesn't matter where it is developed, it'll be sold to the world. Nobody is going to drop millions or billions in the tech and say "Ya, that was neat, no reason to sell it though!"