FIngers crossed. I don't want to be building a nuclear reactor in my basement for nothing.

Any information (that I don't have to search for) about the power density and charge longevity of this storage tech versus other technologies for use in a smaller scale such as notebooks and hand-held electronics?

The killer for the electric car is the charge time, combined with lack of range. If I'm driving my petrol car from (say) Exeter to Inverness (about 600 miles, roughly 10 hours driving), I'll need to fill my car up at least once. Right now, this takes about 10 minutes. Even if the electric car can go 300 miles between charges, I'm not going to want to stand in a service station forecourt for 8 hours while the batteries recharge.

My money's still on Hydrogen.

The electricity grid won't be able to cope with everybody plugging in their electric car overnight. Brownouts and blackouts due to AC use is already pretty common in parts of the US.

The only endemic *-out problems I can think of in the US were the rolling blackouts in California in the early 2000s, but that was due to electricity market manipulation by Enron.

The answer is a standardized battery pack that can be changed out at service stations.

Drive 300 miles, pull in a service station and pop the trunk. A robotic arm (or two big hairy guys) takes out your discharged battery and replace it with a freshly charged battery. You’re on your way. Your used battery is put in the charging rack and is ready for the next customer in a few hours.

If I was only rich enough to do this.

I'd still prefer a 3 minute charge time of a permanent electrical storage system, even if the range was less than 100 miles per charge.

The patent apparently claims 3-6 minutes charge time for 52 kWh.



That seems quite tolerable to me.

Surely the way forward is hydrogen powered vehicles like the Honda FCX Clarity?

Even better would be to replace the Clarity's Li-Ion battery with an eestor device.

To charge it that quickly would likely require more power than is delivered to the average home.

Stu

There's no "likely" about it: you can determine the power from those figures. Three minutes is 1/20 of an hour; 52kWh in 1/20h is over 1 megawatt. An average (UK) house is rated at 50-100A max at 240V, which is 0.012-0.024MW -- much, much less. A megawatt is about the peak usage expected in the UK from a village of 1,000 people.

Of course, the answer to that problem is to keep a second supercapacitor at home, "trickle"-charge it slowly all day, and dump it into your car in one hectic 3-minute blast to refuel. I put "trickle" in quotes because recharging 52kWh each day is actually a continuous load of 2160W, or as much as most electric heaters.

Peter

The fast charge problem isn't as big an issue at the home, but rather when stopping for refueling mid-journey. A roadside service station could be equipped with a much larger electrical service than the typical home.

I'll bet the "gas" station would need to have a large array of "trickle" charged supercapacitors. That would also mean that such a station would have a staggering amount of stored energy in a rack in back somewhere. Pretty much the only vision in my head after that is something from Ghostbusters. "Don't cross the streams."

Won't really bad things happen if you ever crashed and shorted your monster capacitor? Petrol may burn but it doesn't tend to explode.

Even if the *-outs were caused by Enron there will be issues with power distribution unless they upgrade significantly.



Out of a village of 1000, there will be 1000 cars roughly if those percentages are accurate. Not all of them will be used all the time however. Even just assuming that only 1/4 of those cars are in use and charged every day means the electricity consumption has gone up 0.5MW when the entire village only uses 1MW peak.

Some sort of upgrades are going to be required, assuming we move to something other than gasoline. Also, there's no reason that these can't be used in hybrid cars. Ease of recharge can only help with regenerative braking.

I'll believe that when I see it. This thing is designed to have 52KW dumped into it over 2-3 minutes.

Yep, this thing has the same power requirementa as a Flux-Capasitor and just as believable.

Actually it's 1,040,000 watts+ dumped into it over 3 minutes.

Stu

Okay. Not sure where I got 2-3 minutes from but 3-6 minutes

I'd never go for that, Battery packs age and have reduced capacity. I really hate to turn in a good one, for one at it's EOL.

If the EESU works and is going to be out soon, that could be promising. As long as the infrastructure can be decently upgraded to support it anyhow. For the US, the bigger problem is going to be covering the massive amounts of highways with enough places to charge up. There also needs to be a way to deal with a vehicle that runs out of power miles away from a station.

The same challenge of course exists for hydrogen, but I do think it has a better possibility for the future. Anyone know what would be involved with changing over existing gas stations to also have hydrogen storage? To me, I'd imagine it would be simpler then the electric infrastructure needed to support all the existing filling stations to power everyones EESU powered vehicles.

The thing that concerns me about all Hydrogen/Electric vehicles is that when you run out of fuel there's nothing as straightforward as a simple fuel can equivalent. You really do have to get the vehicle to a service station/garage to refuel/recharge.

My thoughts exactly.

Clearly, we're not going to get rid of gasoline quickly- it's just too easy a source of energy to store and deliver.
I'd say improvements to electric-drive methods and regenerative braking, combined with advances in electrical storage, is the future.
I also think we need lighter cars (in the US).

Wasn't it around here on this site that I first saw this video?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0Sy7XnJBPE
(electric Mini w/ custom wheel-motors)

I don't see how swapping in a spare/emergency battery (be it a Li-Ion today or maybe one of these capacitors in the future) would be any less straightforward than pouring gas in. Especially if these things discharge at such an infinitesimal rate, you could keep a small one in the trunk/boot for whenever it's needed. Or, get a ride to the station and pick one up.

It's all just stored energy, right?

The batterys would be life tested and taken out of service if defective. You won't really own your battery. It would operate like welding tanks. Those are exchanged and are EOL'ed after 5 years I think. They are hardly ever refilled.

You can put 5L of gasoline into most cars and get decent enough range out of it allowing you to get out of a jam. 5L of gasoline also doesn't weigh very much and fits into a tiny little package.

The cells used in these vehicles all weigh hundreds of pounds. I suppose a standardized "spare" or "reserve" product could be made to wire into the car without disconnecting the permanently installed batteries, but it's going to be tough to create something small/light with enough juice to get the range required to drive the car to a service station.

I don't think that cars with limited-life batteries (less than 5 years) are going to take off. At least I hope they don't. Electricity as an energy source for vehicles is really only viable with new technology. Li-Ion is crap today in pretty much every common device, they'll be no less crap in a car. The eestor concept sounds extremely positive if a bit too good to be true. We'll see - but the playing field is wide open for new technology. It's an exciting time to be in these industries.

Like Bruno says, it's the size, you're not likely to be able to carry around enough spare batteries or hydrogen to compete with the range you currently get with a petrol canister.

And where do you propose to get the terawatts of electricity required to create the hydrogen to fuel millions of cars? More coal-fired power plants? That'll really help the environnment...

tanstaafl.

Same place everyone seems to think the electricity will come from for all the battery manufacturing plants, and for all the battery powered cars.

There are many ways to get the hydrogen necessary with no methods exceeding the challenges already faced in bringing oil to the pumps. And there are future methods around the corner that will become more efficient, such as using photosynthesis.

As for the power issue on either side, it's a step forward to eliminate the pollution from billions of tiny internal combustion engines, and concentrate the problem to thousands of power generation centers. The energy problems can't be solved overnight, but steps can be taken to continue our independence from oil based solutions. Tossing out an idea just because it's going to require a coal plant here or there is simply refusing to address the problem now, and once again going back to the "well, someone in the future will figure it out" mentality.

Coal plants? I guess someone went and made nuclear power illegal while I was sleeping?

Yes, I know there are issues with safety and waste, but newer designs are almost impossible to meltdown, and any waste issues pale in comparison, IMHO, to the air pollution caused by coal. To simply ignore the existence of a key component of most industrialized nations' energy portfolio is a bit disingenuous, especially when we're talking about air pollution.

Good luck having an adult discussion about nuclear power with the general public.

A while back, Iceland was talking about using geothermal energy to extract hydrogen, and then ship it, similarly to Liquified Gas tankers.

Uhhh.... pretty much, yeah. There has not been a new nuclear power plant put online in the U.S. in, oh, I don't know, thirty years? And not for lack of trying. The regulatory hurdles are pretty much impossible to overcome, and the general public is so unreasonably opposed that there is virtually no chance of getting approval for a new one.

tanstaafl.

Nah, all you need is a fold-up exercise bike and a dynamo. It may take a while though...

Other than that, I'd expect it would be easy to get a jump start; hmmmm, there's a patent idea: a device that you carry in your car, set to 'X joules' and it allows that much energy to flow from one EESU to another. Frankly I guess that running out of juice would be easier to deal with than running out of petrol.

Thankfully no. I was mostly pointing out to Doug that even is we did have no choice other then a few more coal power plants to get some oil burning cars off the road, it would probably be worth it in the long run.

My local utility company keeps a power plant listing showing where my power comes from. Only ~22% of it comes from coal, with ~53% coming from natural gas burning, ~15% from nuclear, ~8% from wind, and 0.4% from landfill methane.

The South Texas plant was brought online in 1988, so only 20 years ago. And with the Nuclear Power 2010 Program, regulations have been eased enough to allow Bellefonte to resume construction and come online sometime after 2017. Other projects on the table since 2005 are listed here.

Well, that is a glimmmer of good news. I was only trying to point out that hydrogen isn't a "free" solution. With current technology it takes more energy to produce the hydrogen to fuel the cars than the hydrogen in the cars can produce, and that power has to come from somewhere. The people looking at the world through rose-colored glasses frequently conclude that "...if only we could convert all our cars to run on hydrogen our pollution problems would be solved" when in truth, again given current technology and state of the infrastructure, the problem would be exacerbated because newer cars (i.e., any car manufactured in the 21st Century) burn cleaner than coal-fired power plants which, in most of the country, provide significant amounts of our electrical power. Coal plants are the fastest and cheapest to build and if there were a sudden upsurge in demand for electrical power, that's what we'd see.

tanstaafl.

Actually, you're right. An electric car doesn't just die when it runs out of juice, it just gets slower and slower.

Sure would help out those idiots that run outta gas in the fast lane and end up stopping there.

I suppose hydrogen fuel would have one advantage over alternatives: it can be "created" nearly pollution-free using desert sunshine, and then efficiently shipped (the pollution part) to where/when it's actually needed.

No coal, no atom-splitting, no peak-hour electric grid expansion, etc.. and a good use for the quarter of the USA (rough guesstimate) that is mostly hot (or cold) sunny desert.

Cheers

I doubt it, what happens when the only car you manage to flag down is a Hydrogen one? Or the other EESU doesn't enough charge to give away.

This device is a capacitor and not a battery. It'll just stop.

The Tesla they were testing on Top Gear 'just stopped' when it ran out as well.

The Tesla on Top Gear didn't actually run out of power. Top Gear pretended that it did to show what you'd have to do.

The discharge curve for most rechargeable battery technologies is pretty flat and then steep right at the end. You don't want to keep trying to drain your batteries more at this point anyway because you'll end up damaging them.

Hydrogen fuel cells are rechargeable batteries. Period. Efficient, light batteries, yes. But just batteries.

I think that that is the best way to explain the situation to the greenwashed.

is there truly any green energy?

i guess the truest green energy harps back to days of windmills and water wheels, where all the pats wee made from trees,

surely everything in the modern 'green' age is a trade off?

even if a car was capable of converting gases from the atmosphere what would it acheive? no doubt 1 billion cars, or however many there are, will one make a huge dent in the some gas or other and cause another global scare.

lets face it, we can all do our little bits, but unless there's some huge catastrophy that takes the world population to that of a few thousand years ago, and we all live in mud huts with no electric, no fossil fuels, etc, the planet will never again attain a level of true self sufficiency.

re the topic, this fuel cell thing, one thing i see no-one has mentioned is the cost of charging such a cell, the average fuel costs are high enough, but imagine dumping megawatts of electricity every year into a car, would it be any cheaper than filling up with petrol / gas every few hundred miles?

while it's an interesting subject, i don't think i'll be truly impressed until someone comes up with a vehicle which utilises perpetual motion / charging, ie, some kind of alternator which generates more power than the car uses.

Solar power comes to mind.

i thought about that as i was thinking my post, but... you still need to build the panels, how green is the manufacturing process? then you need batteries to store power, etc etc.

anyway, with only 3 official days of sunshine in the uk, i'm not sure loar would work!

my father-in-law has a 15m (height) wind turbine on his farm which is pretty pokey. cost is about £20k, 25% grant from the green energy people brought that down a bit. what he doesn't use on the farm goes back into the national grid, which in it's first 1/4 earned him £2k ! paid for in two years barring any major catastrophy. i think it's probably more green than most other options.

Not all solar power is photovoltaic.

The first thing that comes to mind is solar tower technology, where an array of mirrors reflect sunlight to a common collection point at the top of a tower where the heat melts a storage medium, frequently saltpeter. The environmental costs here involve building a tall tower, a (large) number of (large) mirrors with electronically controlled servos, and a mass of saltpeter, plus the workings of a steam turbine. Once it is built, there is no fuel needed.

The US has had one of these in operation (as a test) since '78, Spain recently constructed one that is providing 11MW, and South Africa has a plan for a 100MW tower. (In comparison, a typical nuclear reactor or coal-fired plant provides about 1000 MW.)

I recently watched this meeting of The Commonwealth Club and found the panel members to have many valid points.
The topic is 'Offshore Oil Drilling', but the panel members go after a broad spectrum of energy issues.
If you've got an hour to spend, have a look.

Yeah. But that is because it is at the top of a 15m pole.

There are small wind turbines that you can buy to fit onto your house. They're pretty useless however. One company make one that they quote as being able to generate 1.25KW but once you dig through the specifications you find out that you need around 15m/s windspeed to generate that. 15m/s is gale force 7. At the average wind speeds they quote it will generate less than 100W.

The unit costs around £2000 as well so it will take a long time to recoup that.

Ah! I see where you are coming from. I was thinking of hydrogen as a replacement for petrol in an internal combustion engine. Even so, with a closed-system hydrogen fuel cell, the electricity to recharge the fuel cell has to come from somewhere, and that "somewhere" is very likely to be more polluting than the gasoline engines it replaces.

tanstaafl.

Well, refining petroleum is in itself not particularly clean, and ICEs are about as efficient as they're going to get. Electricity production, on the other hand, can get a lot cleaner in a variety of ways and not link you to a specific technology.

It's important to note that using hydrogen as a combustion fuel sounds like a good idea, as the immediate conclusion is that it just produces water, but if the oxygen supply is air, it ends up creating a variety of nitrous oxides, most of which are toxic at various levels.

Based on this site, they broke down the CO2 and NOx output per mile of an average gas car, and an electric vehicle powered off the grid. Their summary is:

They have a full breakdown, and a link to the government reports on pollution output to back it up. It was the only thing I found in google, beyond a bunch of opinion pieces with no hard facts arguing either side.

Maybe there should be a reserve battery permanently installed with a switch operating like the reserve fuel tap on most motorbikes?

Finland is working on its next nuclear plant, Croatia has one or two in its long-term plans, and elsewhere in Europe public opinion is slowly turning...

Have I already linked this (I cannot find it)? Anyway, an article with good subsequent discussion in SciAm on "Solar Grand Plan". The guys claim that, with 400-500 G$ of subsidies over twenty-ish years (sounds like peanuts now, no?), US could get 90% of its electicity and 70% of total energy from solar plants. There are similar proposals for Euro-African cooperation.

The US already has its money tied up in bailing out the auto industry. It's would be a conflict of interest to back renewable energy.