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)
Re: Awesome! (Score:5, Funny)
Nonsense, this is bleeding edge. In a few weeks, they'll realize that they can use lead, with three charges. Then if they apply that liquid bath, say with a true chemical reaction.... ...hmm, I wonder if sulfuric acid could do the trick....
then they'll have a real, working battery that can compete with Lithium!!!
And you thought this was last year's news?!?
Re: Awesome! (Score:5, Funny)
You know, if they ever perfect those lead batteries, I think they'd also have the benefit of providing hydrogen as a waste product, which is AWESOME because then we can run our fuel cells with it!
It's win-win-win, baybee! Free energy is like money in the bank!
(Now pass me that crack pipe!)
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What do you think this is Toronto ? And your hanging with Mr. Mayor ?
Re: Awesome! (Score:5, Funny)
Are you CRAZY... You cant put acid in consumer controlled devices.
Sulfiric acid can cause severe burns, imagine what would happen if there where industrial or transport accidents and it leaked on people, and what if people take the acid out and thrown in people faces...
No way would the government let people have control of such powerful chemistry, well at least without strict licensing and enforcment laws. You just cant trust society with this sort of technology, its just a matter of time till its used by the terrrist.
Im going to start writting letters straight away about this !!!
Runnin' south on Lake Shore Drive: (Score:2)
"Are you CRAZY... You cant put acid in consumer controlled devices."
Yeah. Who knows how much excess reality it'd end up consuming.
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"Or a Southerner."
I'm one of them damn yankee northerners, and I got my redneck license, too.
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Damn Yankee Northerners do not have rednecks.
They have Farm Boy Engineer's.
Re: Awesome! (Score:4, Funny)
Carbon Nanotubes (Score:3, Insightful)
What about Carbon nanotube Super Capacitors? MIT Nanotube Super Capacitor [peswiki.com]
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Yes, Carbon is even better because it has FOUR charges!
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Screw it all, we're doing five charges. How does it work? Shut up I'm telling you how it works.
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Well we can't just sit around with our cocks in our hands.
They don't tell me what to invent... I tell them.
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Single Charge Cumming soon ?
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I know, we should just ionize lead until it is a nucleus, then we'll have 82 charges! These guys aren't thinking big enough.
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Why aren't we just dumping batteries altogether and going straight to small portable nuclear reactors. Long lasting, and you can just toss em in a deep hole or the middle of the ocean when they are spent.
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Why aren't we just dumping batteries altogether and going straight to small portable nuclear reactors. Long lasting, and you can just toss em in a deep hole or the middle of the ocean when they are spent.
The Flux Capacitor hasn't been invented yet . . .
Re:Carbon Nanotubes (Score:5, Interesting)
Nature has always gone with calcium as the most energy efficient electrical energy medium, a deeper look there especially in nano structures would also be worthwhile.
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There ain't much spare space in cells and logically evolution would drive the most compact possible electrical energy source.
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Not enough, they're looking for one that goes to eleven!
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inspiration [theonion.com]
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Yay lithium! (Score:1)
More for me!
My VISA battery (Score:2)
Has....well way the !@#$% too many charges. :-P
SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid (Score:4)
Who doesn't like a 3,100 C fire in his pants!
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Don't worry. It will only burn off one testicle. The other one will be shielded by the one that gets cooked and any other dangling bits. If you hang to the left just keep your electronics in your right pocket. Butt your back pocket is better.
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You think Lithium is any better?
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Liquid anode/cathode? (Score:2)
How am I going to connect the battery cables to it? /snark
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How am I going to connect the battery cables to it?
Liquid metal.
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Liquid batteries (Score:3)
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You beat me to it, mdsolar. Ambri has some very interesting ideas.
I don't know if the engineering problems will be worked out well enough for it to make it big. They've changed some of the chemistry from the original idea and I'm not sure what they're using now. Hopefully it'll live up to the promise when they start fielding the full up prototypes next year or so.
Regardless of what sort of power source is feeding a grid, large fast responding battery storage would be extremely useful.
I'm a big fan of Don Sa
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fantastic... but... (Score:2)
how does the heat dissipation compare to said to-be-replaced lithium batteries?
all the same, it's good to see progress in the energy storage field.
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Heat dissipation isn't the only issue to worry about. Lithium batteries (of multiple chemistries) certainly don't last the same length of time that the batteries built for the Baker Electric automobiles were able to get away with. Heck, even after a century of usage those old Baker batteries can still be used with only a minor refurbishing of the connectors and making sure you fill up each cell with water before you decide to charge it up. I dare any Lithium battery manufacturer to make that claim.
I anti
Global Warming (Score:2)
This is the type of stuff the governments all over the world should be doing to combat global warming if they actually thought it was real and a threat instead of using it as an excuse to raise taxes.
Now if we could just get them to extend this into other areas like internal combustion engines being more efficient while not tripling their costs or maybe even a drop in replacement for a standard ICE motor in existing vehicles as well as industrial processes and such and I don't think most people who think gl
German battery vunding iz superior (Score:5, Interesting)
The real (boring) article will be about a German factory employing 8,000 people that is selling 3 billion in home batteries per year that work quite well and provide good value to their customers.
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If the Americans build new batter tech, then all the world benefits.
No reason to disparage scientific research just because someone else is doing it differently.
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!"
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the DoE has some top research labs, Ames, Argonne, Fermi, Livermore, Los Alamos,
Had. The keyword is had, and this is something I'm personally very bitter about. I worked at Los Alamos and it was an amazing place. Clearly someone was not making enough money sice they privatised the running of it. These days it's running on momentum since the good people have built lives there and are reluctant to leave. That won't remain.
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Germany tried the same thing with photovoltaic. The result? No demonstrable increase in the rate of innovation, a temporar
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Why would it work any better with batteries?
This time will be different!
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German renewable energy comes mainly from wind and "biomass", not solar. Solar is about 5%, but Germany is effectively dependent on Chinese imports to maintain even that. And Germany has a frightening dependence on foreign energy sources, making it very vulnerable. In contrast, the US has become largely energy independent due to fracking.
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The real (boring) article will be about a German factory employing 8,000 people that is selling 3 billion in home batteries per year that work quite well and provide good value to their customers.
Like this?
http://www.nexeon.co.uk/news/nexeon-secures-strategic-investment-and-forms-partnership-with-world-class-chemicals-company/ [nexeon.co.uk]
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You can be sure that the present and the next German government will ruin the country's goal to go re-newable energy in the next four month. Furthermore, Germany is subsidizing re-newable energy at present by guaranteeing prices to producers of that energy. Of course thew public has to pay for that, but that is no different from that US program which is most likely sponsored by public or newly printed money.
Anyway, the two efforts are quite different. Germany is seeking for cheap electricity storage with a
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While the population in Germany is strongly behind the renewable energy idea, the government never was, beside a short period of seven years including the German Green party. Since then, the renewable energy program has been attacked by the conservative party and the social-democratic party of certain federal states which are the base of large nuclear and fossil fuel power plants. So most of the achievements are based on the peoples persistence.
Why are taxpayers funding this research? (Score:2)
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Private companies aren't doing this research because they believe that (1) they are very unlikely to succeed, and (2) even if they did, there would be no market. Given how much money they would stand to make, they are probably right.
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Why? Because if you succeed, you could own the market for batteries for the next couple of decades, and every car maker would have to buy from you. The fact that companies aren't investing more in it tells you that they believe they aren't going to succeed.
Tesla can afford to stick today's tech into their cars because there is nothing better, and though it really isn't efficient enough by itself, direct and indirect subsidies make it it feasible.
All-liquid is worthy. (Score:2)
An all-liquid formulation is probably the most worthy of these goals, for increasing energy density still further without losing the seriously impressive power density and charge rate of LFP batteries [wikipedia.org]. The voltage will also be a factor in some devices -- already many devices can be powered by single cells, simplifying charge circuits (no need for balancing or detecting a failing cell) and possibly improving reliability (since one failed cell = a dead pack).
Tough goals, especially in 5 years (Score:5, Interesting)
I am a battery scientist, and while I think that Argonne is one of the places where great work is done, they have set very ambitious goals for themselves.
1) Replacing Li with Mg is a lovely idea, but currently there is no fully stable electrolyte and as far as I know nobody has good candidates for electrode materials. Don't even get me started on Al.
2) Lithium-air batteries have been debated to death also here on /.. The current status is again that there seems to be no stable electrolyte, no clear idea of what exactly happens, and if we factor in the weight and complexity of adding various components to the battery assembly to make a real device out of it, the great theoretical energy density of Li-O2 is reduced to Li-ion levels, if not even less.
3) The liquid slurry electrode is an interesting concept which at least recycles materials that are available and known to be working. This is more of an engineering problem than a scientific one, and could see quick advancement in 5 years.
I hope the community as a whole will be able to find the breakthrough to finally have people stop cursing batteries.
Batteries: you hate them since 150 years!
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So in the end we end up with batteries that are 25 times as explosive too?
In my opinion batteries sucks as energy storage for heavy loads like cars. Using capacitor banks to manage start/stop in city traffic and uphill/downhill is another thing.
Room temperature liquids that mix with air to get combustion are easier to manage - contain them if they start to burn and it will stop. Contain a runaway battery and it just accelerates. What we should look at is cheaper processes to produce liquid fuels that are as
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Once you have enough of a battery to give you the range you want, then the power density is not a problem. The only capacitors you need are for high frequency decoupling and they only need to be selected based on ripple current and design lifetime.
A 5 year plan... where have I heard that before? (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-Year_Plans_for_the_National_Economy_of_the_Soviet_Union [wikipedia.org]
Just saying... :D
It would be great if this worked. I just fear that the government might kill some of this technology instead of helping it along.
There are various ways they can do this unintentionally.
1. Take all the profit out of dominating the market removes most of the profit incentive to developing new technologies. If the government just owns this thing or gives it away then the factories that tool up to build it
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Yeah, like the internet, space rockets and satellites, radar, jet engines,nuclear energy, they all came entirely from free enterprise. And I bet you think Ayn Rand is the greatest thinker of all time.
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I think we should call it Obamabattery and have IRS fine anybody who doesn't use it.
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I think we should call it Obamabattery and have IRS fine anybody who doesn't use it.
"If you like your current battery, you can keep your current battery!"
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I think we should call it Obamabattery and have IRS fine anybody who doesn't use it $5 less than the companies charge and end up getting the same thing if we need to go to the store to get one.
fixed that for you
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You can't replace Einstein with 100 scientists.
Hmm, there is a joke about monkeys and typewriters in there somewhere, just can't quite put my fingers on it...
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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.
Comparing electric oranges and gasoline apples (Score:3)
Bear with me now. A gallon of gasoline, depending on blending and the amount of ethanol has a high heating value (HHV) of about 120,000 BTU per gallon. At 100 percent conversion efficiency, 3400 BTUs gives you 1 kWHr, so 100% conversion of a gallon of gas gives 35.3 kWHr. That is what the EPA means by "eMPG" -- the EPA is assuming 100
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1.3KWh * $0.12/KWh * 3000 cycles= $468
468+711 = 1179 cost. 3.9E6/1179 = 3307. 3307*0.8 = 2643 vs gasoline's 2227, so electric still wins.
Or w/ California electric costs the figure for EV is 2270 so even at their electricity prices EV squeeks past gasoline. (though their gas may be more than $3/gal)
This is, of course, before you account for the externalities of pollution.
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.
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For me it isn't range, it is cost. My wife does a 100% city 10-mile round-trip commute. I literally only need 20 miles of charge for that car (to account for accessory use and the occasional shopping trip) - let's go crazy and double it so that when the battery loses capacity we still have the necessary range. Right now, there is nothing affordable on the market. A Leaf, even massively subsidized, would never pay itself back for my wife's commute when compared with something like a Versa (or even an Altima)
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If the Chevy Volt was $20,000 less, they'd sell like hotcakes...
Or, if it was a useful truck rather than a little car, it might be interesting.
I'd love to see a Suburban version of the Volt technology, but it really can't cost more, or much more, than it does now, or there would be little interest.
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That's an interesting idea - a truck or minivan that is economical to run on small trips, but also has long-trip capability. The larger size, weight, and cost of the truck would make the battery less of a problem compared to these ridiculously small things that they battery power now. The fuel savings would be much easier to achieve when you are replacing a 15 MPG truck instead of a 30+ MPG compact.
I suspect the battery pack would need to be astoundingly large. But for me, it'd be great if the minivan could
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People suggest rentals, but the problem with renting a minivan is that they all are spoken for on holiday weekends when everyone gets the same idea as you.
The other problem with rentals is that only a very limited selection of vehicles can be rented, and those are often base models.
It is pretty hard to rent a Suburban anywhere, and if you can, it is likely the basic version.
Knock me all you like for being spoiled (yea, I am), but I like my air conditioned seats in my truck. I like the power folding running boards, the dual DVD players, and the fact that I don't have to set all my favorite radio stations. Plus, for long drives, I have XM sat radio, some
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Yes, it can't be 20K more. It could easily be 5k more, though. A Suburban could burn through that much in 2 years, no problem. 5k extra on something like a Versa is crazy, since it would take forever to use that much gas.
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At $20K extra, it is $333.33 a month, which would require that it never need gas and the power from the wall was free.
Neither of which would be the case. :)
But yes, $5K is fine on something like a Suburban.
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We are calculating total cost of a depreciating asset. One can apply the exact same math to a used car - I'm not sure why you'd jump to the conclusion that I buy new cars. I mentioned the subsidy for the Leaf, but only in passing.
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when it runs out of juice, you're stuck.
yes, that point is totally different from gas!!
yes, you have more gas stations today, but how many gas stations had you 100 years ago? The temporary gas solution for that is a portable gas storage.
with electricity, you can also have portable batteries, and even better you have electricity in almost all places where are people, and you can even generate it your self, or using a solar panel/wind generator if things are really isolated... good luck producing gas!! :)
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If I'm driving cross country, I can't charge my batteries in 5 minutes.
Once batteries can be charged much quicker, a lot of the range issues will go away, but just converting gas stations to electric doesn't help, I'm not going to stand there for an hour. :)
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That already been solved also, you do the exact same thing:
In the deposit, you replace "air" with gas... :)
With batteries, you replace a empty battery with a full one !
while you can manually fill the gas deposit, it's safer and faster to use special equipment
while you can manually remove a battery (ok, you might need some help, they are heavy, unless they already assembled to be in smaller parts) it's safer and faster to use special equipment
yes, the battery are the main problem in electric cars, they still
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Except those numbers just are not true. (Normally we specify the cycle life at the point where the battery still has 60% of capacity and full discharge cycles. )
And of course if your goal was to reduce CO2 you have the opposite effect due to conversion losses.
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Depends on where you live. In Phoenix we're powered by hydro and nuclear, and even have enough electricity to spare that we sell to California who has a shortage. Ironically we're also probably the last place you'd look for hippies or "greenies". I think the main thing is that we just don't have NIMBY syndrome (meanwhile the federal government seems content that we be the kidnapping capital of the world because they won't allow us to take the border situation under control because it bothers the hippies, wh
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NIMBY isn't associated with the hydro, which is far from Phoenix in terms of production.
Further, the nuclear plant (largest in the US, a sight to see) is 45 miles west of Phoenix (a bad location to be honest, north and east of the city would have been safer given prevailing winds).
Did you know it's cooled by sewage (I didn't until a moment ago via Wikipedia):
The Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant is located in the Arizona desert, and is the only large nuclear power plant in the world that is not located near a
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I love the comment about thermodynamics laws, and I wonder where the dried up sewage goes.
I'd probably feed it into industry - a mix of producing fertilizer and incinerating it(done right it can generate more power).
It's more likely that it works a bit like standard desalination where you only remove SOME of the water, discharging the now higher-salinity water back into the ocean(or in this case more poopy sewage).
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NIMBY isn't associated with the hydro, which is far from Phoenix in terms of production.
Not sure what you mean here - SRP alone operates 7 hydro dams, several of which are notoriously large, and include the Roosevelt Dam, and several other dams that are located just on the outskirts of the valley.
There's a lot of NIMBY north of Phoenix (Scottsdale, Cave Creek), try installing solar in a neighborhood (obviously if you have acreage no one will care). HOAs are terrible in the Phoenix area. Been there, done that.
That's more a symptom of newer developments. For whatever god awful reason, (pretty sure it has to do with realtors trying to keep property values up by keeping neighborhoods "forcibly clean") new developments everywhere are being run by HOA's for the most part, and the Phoenix area (Chandler in parti
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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.
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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.
I bought my car (pure EV Nissan LEAF) for similar reasons. I needed a new car, I liked the LEAF, and it was cheaper than any new hybrid or ICE vehicle I compared it to, and I compared a lot of them. Yeah, the LEAF costs more up front, but I estimated that, given my driving patterns, I'd break even in just under six years due to the much lower fuel cost -- and that's without considering tax credits. With the tax credits (which which I disagree philosophically, but that's not going to stop me from reducing m
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Good post, one correction: > gas-powered cars; they only can run on oil products by definition.
Most new cars are E85 compatible, which can be made from any substance that rum can be made from. Corn, srawberries, bananas, potatoes. It does take a heat source to distill... diesiel is even easier with peanut oil...
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OK, lets try the math:
Battery:
(1 kWh/ $500) * 1000 cycles / (300 Wh/mi) = 6.67 mi / $
Gasoline:
(1 gallon / $3.50) * (30 miles / gallon) = 8.57 mi / $
There seems to be lots of uncertainty on battery cost. Several car makers say their packs are under $500 / kWh (One article said Elon Musk expects sub-$200 "soon"). The Tesla Model S 60 kWh battery is warranted for 125k miles, which would seem to be at least 625 cycles is expected.
This certainly seems to me like it is within a factor of 2 of gasoline. A 5x ch
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1. Need to add in the cost of the electricity.
2. The battery is not going to deliver full capacitor on every cycle. 80% would be more reasonable.
3. The rated number of cycles for the battery is almost certainly exaggerated by best case assumptions.
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If $35 every 6 months tilts the balance, then electric has come a long way, indeed.
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Is that the little basket with buns wrapped in a towel you get in good restaurants?
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new 5 year plan
How ironic that you'd describe a government research project that way on the Internet.
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There is nothing ironic about it. I think government funding for basic research is a good thing.
Trying to set specific numerical targets for battery performance is what's stupid. It's stupid when private companies do it, and it's stupid when government does it. The difference is that if private companies engage in this kind of stupidity, they go out of business. Politicians like Obama just blame the opposing party for thei