I own an electric car (on my second one now) that I use for around town. It’s fine for short jaunts, which is the majority of driving. However the limiting factor is of course the battery and the range associated with it. While I can get about 40 miles of city driving, I could probably double that with a lighter, more efficient battery. While I know some people pooh-pooh electric cars, I think mine is rather fun. With gas prices headed toward $5 a gallon, I’ll have even more fun.
My electric car, shown above – a bit like a “smart car”, but slightly larger. My first was little more than a glorified golf cart. This one is full featured.
From the American Chemical Society
New high-performance lithium-ion battery ‘top candidate’ for electric cars
Scientists are reporting development of an advanced lithium-ion battery that is ideal for powering the electric vehicles now making their way into dealer showrooms. The new battery can store large amounts of energy in a small space and has a high rate capacity, meaning it can provide current even in extreme temperatures. A report on this innovation appears in ACS’ Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Bruno Scrosati, Yang-Kook Sun, and colleagues point out that consumers have a great desire for electric vehicles, given the shortage and expense of petroleum. But a typical hybrid car can only go short distances on electricity alone, and they hold less charge in very hot or very cold temperatures. With the government push to have one million electric cars on U.S. roads by 2015, the pressure to solve these problems is high. To make electric vehicles a more realistic alternative to gas-powered automobiles, the researchers realized that an improved battery was needed.
The scientists developed a high-capacity, nanostructured, tin-carbon anode, or positive electrode, and a high-voltage, lithium-ion cathode, the negative electrode. When the two parts are put together, the result is a high-performance battery with a high energy density and rate capacity. “On the basis of the performance demonstrated here, this battery is a top candidate for powering sustainable vehicles,” the researchers say.
The authors acknowledge funding from WCU (World Class University) program through the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation.
ARTICLE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE “An Advanced Lithium Ion Battery Based on High Performance Electrode Materials”
DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT ARTICLE http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ja110522x
When I look that car I do not think it will be a big seller.
Just can’t picture people in Tennesse driving around in that with a
six-pack in the front seat. Also, where do you install the gun-rack!
Have fun paying for your $4+ gasoline, [snip].
What almost everbody seems to forget when talking about the merits of the electric car , is that (apart from the limited range between charges) there is ,so far, usually a limited lifetime on the batteries that do more than nullify any fuel savings achieved over their lifetime , typical battery lifetime is around 3 year ( ~ 1000 full charges ) , and fuel savings $ maybe something 1000$/yr or 3000$ per batterylife, and that leaves you quite short when faced with an 8-10 thousund $ bill for replacing the worn out batteries.
Currently a fossil fuelled car has 1 battery an electric has 10 or more.If we are to replace all fossil fuelled cars with electric do we have enough batteries and what is the battery life.?
One of the really big news about batteries is the work being done with graphene, a form of pure carbon crystal that was discovered in 2004.
These headlines more or less speak for themselves. Graphene apparently will play a part as both quick-charge battery terminals and as supercapacitors.
Gizmodo (Sep 18, 2008) — “Graphene Could Become World’s Best Battery” —
http://gizmodo.com/#!5051545/graphene-could-become-worlds-best-super-battery
GreenCarCongress (26 November 2010)— “Graphene-based supercapacitor offers energy density comparable to NiMH battery, but with rapid charge and discharge” — http://www.greencarcongress.com/2010/11/liu-20101126.html
PopSci.com (July 15, 2010) — “In Stores Soon: Graphene-Enhanced Li-ion Batteries That Charge In Minutes” — http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2010-07/coming-soon-graphene-enhanced-li-ion-batteries-charge-your-gadgets-minutes
NetworkWorld (July 19, 2010) — “Graphene cuts battery recharge times –
Batteries with Vorbeck’s graphene material could reach devices next year” — http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/071910-graphene-cuts-battery-recharge.html
Graphene is the most amazing material to come along in a long while. It is basically the underlying material that makes up graphite. But while graphite is several layers thick, graphene is only 1 to 10 atoms thick crystalline “nano-sheets”. It has amazing properties that include being superior to silicone as transistors, better than teflon (it seems so far) as a non-stick coating, and it has extremely high thermal properties. New applications are being found about every month or so, many of them very surprising.
Take a look at those links and Google “Graphene battery” or just “graphene” to begin learning about it.
Put together with the Thorium MSR nuclear plants being developed in China and the 200,000 year supplies of Thorium that China has (and the U.S. I believe probably has even more), the energy equation of the future may not even need to include fossil fuels at all. The technology either now exists or is being developed to take us into the 22nd century oil free.
That is what I see on the near horizon and on into the future: Thorium reactors producing electricity that we use in graphene super-capacitor cars that charge all but as fast as a fill-up now takes. Who knows what range they may have, but it will certainly outstrip what we have come up with so far.
And this is just the first generation of graphene applications. Who knows what the future holds? I can see small models of Thorium reactors at every “gas station,” perhaps on every residential block and in every parking garage. Decentralization of energy may be the democratization/webification of energy.
Just in the interest of sharing information (do not, I repeat do not, follow my investment strategies….:) readers who have not heard of the mysterious Eestor, which is allegedly producing a game changing capacitor that has the energy density of a battery but can charge and discharge in a matter of minutes instead of hours, may be curious to read here: http://www.theeestory.com/. If nothing else, it is a fascinating saga — like Watts Up one of the most interesting places to lurk and read on the internet.
Cheers,
psi
The ACS (an ardent AGW supporter) was mentioned by a couple of contributors above. Recently they published an article dreaming about the future when all our power was “sustainable” The hooker is that they were talking about the cost of all this as being in the range of $1.3 trillion (yes, that ‘s with a T.) A lot of the cost was for constructing transmission lines to bring the electricity from the southwest where the solar energy panels would be to the concentrations of power users.
It’s true that we import too much of our crude, and much of it from unreliable sources. However, natural gas from shale is now in surplus in the USA, and plans are being made to export it (instead of importing LNG as was planned a few years ago.) If we were serious about energy independence, we could make gasoline and diesel fuel from coal (the Sasol process as practiced in South Africa) or from shale oil, or natural gas. A few years ago ExxonMobil and later Shell were talking about a plant to convert natural gas in Qatar to liquid fuels. I believe these plans were dropped in favor of liquifaction plants. No doubt gasoline from such sources would cost more than gasoline from crude at less than $2 a gallon. But as gasoline cost goes up and the Middle East is in turmoil, the price of crude will certainly escalate. What stops this kind of practical solution is our government’s obsession with carbon dioxide generation. Sooner or later, with lines at gas stations, the public will wake up and demand solutions.
@Dennis Wingo February 23, 2011 at 3:59 pm:
Yeah, Ted Turner was all hot to trot about steam cars (I am going to say around 1980 or so). Then one day he saw a prototype with steam passages in the sides of the car. He asked what would happen in the case of a side-impact crash.
I leave it up to you what the answer was…
Well I hate to drizzle the cold rain of hard reality backed by dependable calculation on the exciting party about wonderful electric cars. Tee Hee.
Not to be unfair to most WUWT readers, as expressed above, they are generally a pretty hard headed bunch of realists.
As I have said before I posted an article on electric cars cars on Jeff Id’s blog a while back about how we did it over thirty years ago. Of course in the light of comments and reflection I could have written it better but when was that not so? what is done is done.
Its here:
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/electric-cars/
To address the more specific question of the core of any electric vehicle, the battery, more correctly the accumulator, but I will use the term battery here, what does the above excited announcement mean?
Very little. The inventors/developers are to be congratulated on devising a new cheaper electrode but the cell is still in the experimental stage and frankly on their own figures not that promising.
Consider this. Very roughly if you burn 1 Kg of liquid hydrocarbon you will release about 12 Kwhr of heat which your modern engine depending on design and usage will turn into work at an efficiency of between 25 and 50 percent. The combustion draws the oxidant from the air and rejects the reaction products, chiefly water and CO2 to the atmosphere.
A battery delivers electricity which can be turned into work more efficiently, at best
around 90 percent, but it has to provide both the reagents in the REDOX reaction as well as an intermediary to promote the reaction and finally of course structure and containment.
Now very, very roughly, in theory, and only in theory, a battery might achieve about one tenth of the stored energy for weight as a liquid hydrocarbon fuel: so about 1200 Whrs per Kg.
In practice real batteries don’t get anywhere near this, more or less around a tenth is the best they can do, 120 Whr per Kg is typical today. And of course the battery suffers losses in charging, up to 20% of charge and to a lesser extent. up to 10% on discharge.
Why such poor performance? Well essentially the problem is getting sufficient amounts of reagent into the REDOX reaction. This is not so much a matter of chemistry as physics and engineering. There is of course much talk of increasing the surface area of electrodes with nanotechnology etc. which can make for increased charge/discharge rates but does not address this basic problem.
Nor does cell chemistry as such, there is only a very limited choice and a balance has to be struck between energy density and stability. For instance the Lithium cell has a high EMF and so energy density but its range of voltage over discharge/charge and sensitivity to temperature makes it quite unstable and liable to suffer acute thermal runaway as various manufacturers and laptop users have discovered.
This is essentially a cell management difficulty and there are engineering solutions, practical but not necessarily cheap, which also limit performance.
35 years ago we elected for a NiZn cell, the Drumm cell which was so obscure that none of us had ever heard of it. In fact Dr. Drumm, an excellent chemist, had realised where Edison went wrong with his NiZn cell and produced a very practical cell, so good that it was used to power electric trains and heavy goods vehicles before WW2.
Dr. Drumm’s chemistry was entirely right but his physics and engineering left something to be desired. As was common in those days I was sent to sort the problem out. Which did not prove too difficult, within a few months we could build a battery for small electric cars which managed about 90 Whr per Kg with a 1000 cycle deep discharge cycle.
We were very conservative about this and as I said in the article listed above we could then have possibly pushed it up by 20% and observed we could do better than that today: in fact having back of the envelope calculations I think we could easily double that figure. And NiZn is not only cheap but recyclable.
Would that be good enough?
Barely so.
Modern cars are bigger and heavier and worst of all are driven faster with very high aerodynamic losses. Back then it was thought an improvement of three to four times, which maybe now in reach, might be sufficient. Nowadays you probably need more like eight times. Can batteries do that? NO.
Not Nohow.
Kindest Regards
Same thing will likely happen with the electrics. The “issue” no one wants to talk about, is what happens when you have a dead short across a high capacity, high current battery — a kilowatt class arc and lots of flying molten metal.
Wait until some green advocate gets rear ended by a truck and his children in the back seat get incinerated in a ball of plasma from a near instantaneous discharge of the battery.
At least a gasoline fire can be controlled and extinguished, where an uncontrolled electrical discharge from a battery pack of this capacity will be a spectacular light show, and will instantly ignite any nearby flammable materials in the lightweight auto construction (can we say burning magnesium components and flash fire from vaporized aluminum and fiberglass/carbon fiber composite).
I have a great deal of respect for high energy density electrical storage devices such as super capacitors or high energy batteries. It would be wise for the general public to understand that catastrophic sudden discharge of these batteries is a probably result of some accident scenarios, and to plan accordingly.
Until the electric car manufactures demonstrate that this is not a risk, I am not buying (even if I had the money to throw away on a fad product).
Larry
a jones says:
February 23, 2011 at 8:25 pm
“Well I hate to drizzle the cold rain of hard reality backed by dependable calculation on the exciting party about wonderful electric cars. Tee Hee.”
========
Yet, you did it anyway.
What does that say about you.
u.k.(us) says:
February 23, 2011 at 9:31 pm
That I am an old curmudgeon of course. But one who happens to know an awful lot about electric cars.
Kindest Regards.
“hotrod (Larry L) says:
February 23, 2011 at 8:50 pm”
You can also get some pretty sparks from two 400a/h batteries connected in series. And even something as little as Ni-Cad battery in a laptop can cause severe burns and start fires.
I understand Toyota still does not have a returns policy for its battery packs in their hybrid cars.
I think people forget that electric cars are only now coming into play and that cars driven by petroleum products neither had the range or performance when they first started.
Petrol is now 135p per litre in the UK, or about $9 an imperial gallon.
Andy
Replacing Anthony’s existing batteries with new technology batteries would be frightfully expensive. MasterVolt wanted to charge up to £5000 for one super dooper marine battery in the UK. I made my excuses and hung up. ;<{
I found driving electric 106s nice. Wonderful acceleration, and no gear changes. So silent we had a special lesser horn to beep people to get out of the way. You expect to hear a car, and with our electrics you did n’t.
a jones says:
February 23, 2011 at 10:23 pm
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The post wasn’t about electric cars, but I’m sure one will be coming.
u.k.(us) says:
February 23, 2011 at 11:28 pm
a jones says:
February 23, 2011 at 10:23 pm
=============
The post wasn’t about electric cars, but I’m sure one will be coming.
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Kindest Regards
Oh, Anthony – I think it is going to be a LONG time before these vehicles become economical enough to justify their existence. The battery technology is going to have to improve by leaps and bounds to make them as useful as a conventional internal combustion engine or a hybrid vehicle. I have a hybrid, and I think hybrids are better because they allow more cruising range while saving gasoline (I get 34.3 combined mpg right now, and I don’t have to charge up!). It’s a good thing you have only two miles to commute. If you had to drive around the San Diego area like I have to drive around the Dallas/Fort Worth area, you’d be hard pressed – especially since the Volt (if that is what you have, I don’t know) requires only premium gasoline. If it’s all electric, never mind. But I’d rather keep my hybrid.
Anthony, the car looks very smart. My dad, about 15 years ago, swopped his Lotus sports car for an electric car. It was very impractical but at least he only lived a few miles from town and it was perfectly adequate for town use. In fact it was a bit of a novelty and when my dad use to go out to the pub or restaurant, they would run a lead to the car and charge it up. This was necessary since my dad lived in a hilly/mounainous area where performance soon dropped off.
My gripe is that Green technology is never as green as the ‘Greens’ would have one believe. Windfarms are a classic example which have not resulted in the closure of a single conventional power station and the carbon footprint of manufacture and installation is huge. Hybrid cars are another example. The CO2 footprint of manufacture of those vehicles is significantly greater than an ordinary car.
So too electric cars. The daily Mail is today running an article suggesting that they are more dirty than diesel. See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1360062/Watchdog-says-electric-cars-dirty-diesel.html
There have been significant advances in the efficiency of small engines and the greenest form of motoring is to have a small and light car (for the majority of ones use) with an engine of about 1100ccs.
The reality is that the present state of alternative technologies is not such that a switch to green technologies is yet a practical proposition nor does it yet do anything to save the environment.
‘it’s all about the battery’ ultracapacitors will solve the problem soon or later.
British scientists have developed a synthetic petrol produced from hydrogen which will be commercially available in 3-5 years and works in current petrol powered internal combustion engines without modification. It will cost around 90p per gallon (about a dollar?) before taxes and it produces no harmful emissions – real or imagined.
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/cartech/uk-researchers-invent-artificial-petrol-costing-19p-per-litre-50002478/
I don’t think electric cars have much of a future.
Not only is it battery life, and cost of replacement, it is also about thermodynamic efficiency. Every energy conversion suffers an efficiency loss. Lean burn petrol or diesel is more cost effective and more efficient and easy to refuel. Do not worry about CO2 plants love it and it is not a pollutant.
It is certainly not beyond the wit of modern engineers and scientists to create vehicles that produce little or no CO2. I’m looking forward to witnessing these new developments. What will also be interesting is the reaction of the more politically motivated environmentalists. I’m convinced that no matter how “clean” personal vehicles can be made there will be strong resistance from a vocal set of political environmentalists. Having “clean” options will make this more apparent as time goes on.
At least you aren’t advocating that the rest of us be forced to own electrics if they aren’t practical for our lifestyle. Other commenters have made good points about the source of energy for electrics being carbon based for the most part. Don’t forget that the much ballyhooed Chevy Volt is being subsidized by tax breaks and stands no chance of succeeding without government support.