dagblog - Comments for "New battery design could give electric vehicles a jolt"

Thanks for the link, Donal.1.

quinn esq — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 17:33:26 +0000

In reply to New battery design could give electric vehicles a jolt

Thanks for the link, Donal.

1. The field of battery research is exploding in recent years, and with manufacturing going up by a scale of 100,000 - costs are collapsing. Your second link shows a chart on page 3 of the PDF, with a wide range of cost estimates on batteries from different consulting groups. What was interesting at that stage - 1-3 years ago - was WHO the consultants were working for. For example, a Fuel Cell and Hydrogen working group came out with one of the highest estimates, and got a lot of play, with hardly anyone noting that they were actually competitors to EVs and PHEVs.

Anyway, as it turned out, real costs/unit - e.g. in the Volt - turned out to be at the bottom of the cost estimates, below the levels the anti-EV consulting groups had projected for 2020 and even 2030. Deutsche Bank were one of the lowest, and came back to announce - a year later - that costs had even turned out lower than they'd expected.

2. As for the new battery from MIT, it looks incredibly interesting, though not so much from a cost perspective. They claim they think they can halve the size and cost of Li-Ion batteries, but the downward trend will already see that within 3-5 years - not the 10 years needed to commercialize the new design.

Where it's interesting to me is the fact that it may - not sure, but "may" - offer another way to "refill." Right now, there's really 3 methods. 1) Plug it into the usual wall socket, and give it an hour per kwh. This is gonna work fine for most people, as long as their one-way commutes are under 30 miles or so. 2) Install special fast-charge sites. This takes not only special batteries, but special charging equipment, and it has a REAL impact on the grid. This stuff gets trickier. 3) Swapping out the battery entirely, a la Better Place. For 1001 reasons, I think this model is gonna fail (outside of small island nations), as it restricts battery innovation, takes batteries out of the hands of carmakers, and technically, faces a whole range of obvious obstacles.

But a pumpable "liquid slurry"? That's a new kid on the block. Beyond the technical "can it actually do this" questions though, there are still the issues of how and where will they actually add the charge to the slurry? Because the grid impacts - as in #2 above - are significant. (For example, recharging 100 car batteries a day at a station, with say, 30 kwh's each, would draw 3,000 kw's an hour. That's 3 MW's - a heck of a punch.)

The idea that maybe they might be used as a new and improved form of battery at remote wind and solar stations is very intriguing as well. You could either levelize the otherwise somewhat-intermittent load, and make it effectively dispatchable, or even tap it off and use it for local/remote vehicles.

3. Right now, my money - and I think, our society's focus - should be on recharging method #1. It's not for everyone, but there's a good 100 million cars sitting out there today, in North America, inside garages that have electric outlets, being driven through light-duty tasks, of 20-50 miles per day. With battery costs falling fast, with next year's Plug-In Prius expected at $25-$30,000, the next Volt expected at <$30,000 and so on, and with the ability through this existing technology to reduce an average family's gasoline consumption by 80% (from 20 mpg to 100 mpg) - I'd take it.

4. As for the second link from MIT and the symposium, I'd just note that the field is so fast-changing that predictions are often outdated by the time they're written - and in particular, grand statements from Profs "Emeritus" just aren't that useful. "Electrification" is NOT seen by those in the industry as a "niche." Hell, look at what Nissan is betting, alone.

And the 1% improvement thing got completely blown out of the window by hybridization, much less electrification.

Whether we can ACTUALLY capture those gains is a question of policy and such, but it's not that "the technology" isn't there to improve more than 1% a year.

(No subject)

cmaukonen — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 13:55:50 +0000

In reply to Policy, infrastructure - easy

Also, they don't really say

Donal — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 12:21:52 +0000

In reply to Yeah. I read the article and

Also, they don't really say what happens to the exhausted slurry. But, if people expect that someday they can drive up and recharge their EV as fast as pumping gas, it will help the marketing.

Yeah. I read the article and

Beetlejuice — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 10:07:59 +0000

In reply to Interesting. I would expect

Yeah. I read the article and concluded all I would get out of it would be a smaller, long lasting car battery. I didn't see any significant breakthru other than reducing the flow of exhausted lead-acid battery cases in junkyards.

Now if that battery could power one of those new Tesla sportscars running at, say 130 KPM, down the autobahn from Frankfurt to Munich and still have enough pep to putter around to all the summer beer gardens, then I might be more interested.

Interesting. I would expect

cmaukonen — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 01:14:44 +0000

In reply to New battery design could give electric vehicles a jolt

Interesting. I would expect it to hit the market in around 10 years or so. Assuming there is some one or some company that would be willing the tool up to manufacture them. Then in another 10 years time they may become cost effective for the average person.

Policy, infrastructure - easy

Donal — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 18:51:52 +0000

In reply to ...but harnessing them on a

Policy, infrastructure - easy as fallin' off a log.

...but harnessing them on a

Rootman — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 18:36:49 +0000

In reply to From the same

...but harnessing them on a scale that would significantly lower greenhouse-gas emissions or oil imports is complicated simplifed by issues of choosing the right policies and of implementing needed infrastructure improvements.

From the same

Donal — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 18:11:26 +0000

In reply to New battery design could give electric vehicles a jolt

From the same source:

Electrifying transportation: Devil is in the details

The technologies needed to begin seriously weaning the U.S. transportation system away from petroleum and toward alternatives such as hybrid and pure electric vehicles have made great progress, but harnessing them on a scale that would significantly lower greenhouse-gas emissions or oil imports is complicated by issues of choosing the right policies and of implementing needed infrastructure improvements.
...
All of the transportation technologies, both the conventional ones and the newer ones, are improving all the time, ... , and the newer ones are getting better faster. But for now, those in the industry tend to see electrification — whether through plug-in hybrids or pure electric vehicles — as just a niche market, primarily because such vehicles are too expensive in their current form, and petroleum currently is not expensive enough.

Heywood said that recent developments in automotive technologies have improved fuel efficiency on average by about 1 percent per year, whereas projections of economic and population growth suggest worldwide fuel usage is increasing by about 2 percent per year — a disparity that is clearly not sustainable.