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.