How the World's Fastest Electric Car Is Pushing Wireless Charging Tech 49
An anonymous reader writes With the first ever season of Formula E revving up in China next month, it's clear there's more to electric cars than Tesla. But the race cars hitting the track in Beijing don't have anything on the speed of Drayson Racing Technology's Lola B12 69/EV, which holds the record for the world's fastest lightweight electric car, and which uses the kind of power technologies that could one day have applications off the track too—like charging your phone wirelessly.
Quite warm beneath the car, right? (Score:5, Informative)
Let's do the numbers: if you want this 30 kWh battery charged in one hour (you're in a race, remember?) you'll have to supply 30 kW. At an efficiency of 80% (TFA -- I know, I know) you're looking at losses of 30 * (1/.8 -1) kW = 30 * .25 kW = 7.5 kW. That's a friggin' garage heater!
I'd still go with a thick copper plug, really.
Re:LOL (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Just stop it with the 'zero emissons' claims (Score:4, Informative)
You act like there's no research papers on this subject. There have been tons, and the conclusions in each case are the same:
1) CO2 emissions would decline even on the US's current grid (which is, I should add, getting cleaner every year, while the amount of emissions associated with oil production keep rising)
2) On a generation basis, every region in the US has enough space capacity for a full switchover of the passenger fleet today, without any new plant construction, except the Pacific Northwest. Most charging is done at night when most power plants lie idle, but the Pacific Northwest is an exception because their heavy use of hydro means time of use isn't important, only net consumption.
3) The only thing that there's not enough of at present is simply local distribution capacity, to peoples' homes.
Of course, that's for a complete, instantaneous switchover, which is of course an impossiblity. Your average car is driven for about two decades before it goes to scrap, only a small fraction rotate out of service every year. And that's assuming that everyone bought EVs as replacement, which if course is an impossiblity because even if everyone was suddenly sold on the concept of EVs it'd take a decade or more to ramp up production to that level. And of course everyone is not suddenly sold on the concept of EVs. You're looking at maybe a 30-40 year transition time period here. If power companies can't keep up with a trend that's stretched out over the scale of several decades, they deserve to fail.
20kW is not fast enough (Score:4, Informative)
Tesla superchargers charge at 120kW with a wired connection. 20kW is not fast enough to quickly charge an electric vehicle that has enough batteries to provide adequate range. Even the Fast DC chademo chargers for the leaf can charge at 50kW.
Fast wireless charging will never happen because wasting 10% of your power as heat under the vehicle will cause things to melt at high power rates.