Venture capital start-up EEStor claims their battery outperforms lithium-based batteries.
EEStor claims that its system, called an electrical energy storage unit (EESU), will have more than three times the energy density of the top lithium-ion batteries today. The company also says that the solid-state device will be safer and longer lasting, and will have the ability to recharge in less than five minutes. Toronto-based ZENN Motor, an EEStor investor and customer, says that it's developing an EESU-powered car with a top speed of 80 miles per hour and a 250-mile range. It hopes to launch the vehicle, which the company says will be inexpensive, in the fall of 2009.
But skepticism in the research community is high. At the EESU's core is a ceramic material consisting of a barium titanate powder that is coated with aluminum oxide and a type of glass material. At a materials-research conference earlier this year in San Francisco, it was asked whether such an energy-storage device was possible. "The response was not very positive," said one engineering professor who attended the conference.
Click through to read the details on what they claim and why some academics are skeptical. If they succeed and can hit low enough price points then electric cars become quite viable. Plus, wind and solar will become more viable as baseload power sources. We are in a race between the depletion of oil fields and the development of substitute technologies. Battery technologies play a very important part in that race.
Materials science prof Arumugam Manthiram at the University of Texas at Austin might have made a big contribution toward our move toward electrically powered vehicles. A new way to make lithium iron phosphate batteries cuts costs by lowering the temperature needed to make them.
But it has proved difficult and expensive to manufacture lithium iron phosphate batteries, which cuts into potential cost savings over more conventional lithium-ion batteries. Typically, the materials are made in a process that takes hours and requires temperatures as high as 700 °C.
Hours at high temperatures suggest a large energy cost for lithium battery manufacture and a big energy debt that each electric car would start out with.
Manthiram's method involves mixing commercially available chemicals--lithium hydroxide, iron acetate, and phosphoric acid--in a solvent, and then subjecting this mixture to microwaves for five minutes, which heats the chemicals to about 300 °C. The process forms rod-shaped particles of lithium iron phosphate. The highest-performing particles are about 100 nanometers long and 25 nanometers wide. The small size is needed to allow lithium ions to move quickly in and out of the particles during charging and discharging of the battery.
What I'd like to know: How much energy does it take for A123Systems and other lithium battery makers to manufacture their batteries? The answer to that question would give us an idea of how many miles a hybrid, pluggable hybrid, or pure electric car would have to be driven before it would save more energy than it took to manufacture it originally.
The price of oil hit $138.54 on June 6, 2008. Our need for electric cars becomes more urgent with every surge in oil and gasoline prices. But the battery for the General Motors Chevy Volt pluggable hybrid looks too expensive for the mass market.
How much you'll pay for one remains an open question, and one answered by the price of the lithium ion batteries. "They're over $1,000 a kilowatt hour," Tom Turrentine, director of the Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle Research Center at UC-Davis, told Wired.com. "The Volt battery is 16 kilowatt hours. That's $16,000 just for the battery."
GM originally claimed the Volt would go on sale for $30,000. But GM has indicated $40k to $48k might be more likely. According to Wired GM will probably restrict initial 2010 model production of the Volt to 30,000 units.
The 16 kwh battery for a car that goes 40 miles on battery power means it uses 400 watt-hours per mile. That seems a high rate of electric usage per mile for a car designed for very high efficiency. Anyone have expertise to offer on this?
A few readers complain I'm not sufficiently optimistic about the potential for technological advances to solve our energy problems. Well, look at the facts. The world oil production plateau might not last beyond 2008 or 2009. We are going to enter the early stages of world oil production decline without the technologies needed to shift to electric cars. Car companies have limited capacities to produce even conventional hybrids. Just go try to buy a hybrid Ford Escape which has a production limit of 25,000 per year. We are not ready. Our living standards are going to decline.
The technological advances will eventually come. But we'll have much lower living standards by the time those advances arrive and the incorporation of those advances into capital and consumer products will take years and lots of money. The 2010s will be tough.
Update: Limits on battery production capacity prevent a big ramp-up of hybrid car manufacturing.
But another problem in keeping up with demand is an acute shortage of the nickel-metal-hydride batteries required for hybrid vehicles. GM's launch of its new hybrid-SUVs has been delayed for nearly three months by a labor dispute at a key supplier of the batteries. And Toyota's chances of getting more hybrids into showrooms is foundering on the battery shortage. "We can't produce enough batteries right now," Carter says. A new plant for the nickel-metal-hydride batteries won't come on line until 2010.
2010 is 2 years. Toyota can't ramp up hybrid construction for 2 years? Bad news. The article also reports a Ford spokesman saying that Ford can only get 24,000 NiMH batteries per year that they need for their Escape Hybrid.
Our ability to technologically respond to declining oil production is still pretty poor. Choose job and residence address to minimize your commuting. In the US do not buy a car that gets less than 30 mpg highway. Do not count on technological advances to save us in the short run.
Can improvements on the lead acid battery make it viable for hybrid electric cars?
The future market for hybrid-electric vehicles, at least those that are affordable, isn't necessarily paved with lithium. Researchers in Australia have created what could be called a lead-acid battery on steroids, capable of performing as well as the nickel-metal hydride systems found in most hybrid cars but at a fraction of the cost.
The so-called UltraBattery combines 150-year-old lead-acid technology with supercapacitors, electronic devices that can quickly absorb and release large bursts of energy over millions of cycles without significant degradation. As a result, the new battery lasts at least four times longer than conventional lead-acid batteries, and its creators say that it can be manufactured at one-quarter the cost of existing hybrid-electric battery packs.
The battery has undergone extensive testing in Britain.
The odometer of a low emission hybrid electric test vehicle today reached 100,000 miles as the car circled a track in the UK using the power of an advanced CSIRO battery system.
The UltraBattery combines a supercapacitor and a lead acid battery in a single unit, creating a hybrid car battery that lasts longer, costs less and is more powerful than current technologies used in hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs).
“The UltraBattery is a leap forward for low emission transport and uptake of HEVs,” said David Lamb, who leads low emissions transport research with the Energy Transformed National Research Flagship.
“Previous tests show the UltraBattery has a life cycle that is at least four times longer and produces 50 per cent more power than conventional battery systems. It’s also about 70 per cent cheaper than the batteries currently used in HEVs,” he said.
By marrying a conventional fuel-powered engine with a battery to drive an electric motor, HEVs achieve the dual environmental benefit of reducing both greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel consumption.
The UltraBattery also has the ability to provide and absorb charge rapidly during vehicle acceleration and braking, making it particularly suitable for HEVs, which rely on the electric motor to meet peak power needs during acceleration and can recapture energy normally wasted through braking to recharge the battery.
The designers claim their battery will lower hybrid car design costs by $2000.
The test vehicle was a Honda Insight: a production hybrid (no longer in production) that used a nickel metal hydride battery (the same technology as powers the Toyota Prius). "Our goal was to fit our battery into the same space," Lamb said. "It is 17kg heavier and that creates a fuel consumption penalty of 2.8 percent. But it is about one quarter of the cost, so you save around $2000 on the cost of building the car."
The UK test was undertaken in collaboration with the Furukawa Battery Company of Japan, which manufactured the battery and the US Advanced Lead-Acid Battery Consortium.
The high price of oil should cause a burst of innovation in the coming years. The incentives for energy innovation have gone up dramatically. For this reason alone we should expect some game-changing innovations to emerge in energy and transportation.
Silicon nanowires will improve lithium ion batteries by an order of magnitude of capacity?
Stanford researchers have found a way to use silicon nanowires to reinvent the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that power laptops, iPods, video cameras, cell phones, and countless other devices.
The new version, developed through research led by Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, produces 10 times the amount of electricity of existing lithium-ion, known as Li-ion, batteries. A laptop that now runs on battery for two hours could operate for 20 hours, a boon to ocean-hopping business travelers.
"It's not a small improvement," Cui said. "It's a revolutionary development."
If this works out it really is revolutionary. Will the batteries last through many rechargings? Will they be manufacturable?
Cui thinks these batterries will work in electric cars and as a way to store solar photovoltaic electric power.
The breakthrough is described in a paper, "High-performance lithium battery anodes using silicon nanowires," published online Dec. 16 in Nature Nanotechnology, written by Cui, his graduate chemistry student Candace Chan and five others.
The greatly expanded storage capacity could make Li-ion batteries attractive to electric car manufacturers. Cui suggested that they could also be used in homes or offices to store electricity generated by rooftop solar panels.
"Given the mature infrastructure behind silicon, this new technology can be pushed to real life quickly," Cui said.
The future is electric. The sooner we can make the shift from oil to non-fossil fuels methods of electric power the better off we'll be.
This discovery is not consistent with conspiracy theories about how oil companies are holding back discoveries of substitutes. Though I'm confidence dedicated conspiracists can reconcile this announcement. Anyway, ExxonMobil claims a discovery by their researchers will make lithium ion batteries usable in cars.
ExxonMobil Chemical and ExxonMobil's Japanese affiliate, Tonen Chemical, have developed new film technologies for lithium-ion batteries with the potential to improve the energy efficiency and affordability of next generation hybrid and electric vehicles.
These new film technologies are expected to significantly enhance the power, safety and reliability of lithium-ion batteries, thereby helping speed the adoption of these smaller and lighter batteries into the next wave of lower-emission vehicles.
“By developing new film technologies that allow lithium-ion batteries to meet hybrid and electric vehicle requirements, ExxonMobil Chemical is helping to make next generation vehicles more energy and cost efficient, as well as lighter,” said Jim P. Harris, senior vice president, ExxonMobil Chemical Company. “We are currently working with industry-leading battery manufacturers to expand the boundaries of current hybrid and electric vehicle applications.”
The nickel metal hydride batteries found in hybrids like the Toyota Prius don't have enough storage capacity and low enough cost to make pluggable hybrids and pure electric cars practical. The great hope is for both cost and safety breakthroughs with lithium-based batteries. A number of companies are chasing this goal. A123Systems and LG Chem are both in the running to supply next gen batteries to General Motors for the Chevy Volt pluggable hybrid. ExxonMobil apparently is making it easier for more lithium battery makers to compete. Sounds good to me.
The film protects batteries from overheating of the sort that caused laptop batteries to catch fire.
Exxon Mobil developed its film with Japanese affiliate Tonen Chemical. Invented in research labs at Exxon Mobil's Baytown complex, the film is the first to squeeze multiple layers of plastic into a single white sheet the width of a human hair.
The added layers enable the batteries to run at higher temperatures — and produce more power — while still protecting them from overheating, company officials said. It also incorporates features that cause it to shut down if there is a short circuit in the battery.
Exxon and Tonen are going into production with this film at a plant in Gumi South Korea.
Exxon says this film will make a new generation of hybrids possible.
"This new technology for making films, will make the next generation of hybrid and electric vehicles possible," said Jim Harris, a senior vice president at ExxonMobil Chemical Co.
The world is in a race between population growth and resource depletion that cause problems and technological advances that solve at least some of those problems. Advances in battery technologies definitely fit the bill as necessary to deal with resource depletion and population growth.
A Texas company might have an ultracapacitor design that will make electric cars a reality.
An Austin-based startup called EEStor promised ''technologies for replacement of electrochemical batteries,'' meaning a motorist could plug in a car for five minutes and drive 500 miles roundtrip between Dallas and Houston without gasoline.
Observers hesitate to dismiss this secretive company because they've managed to attract big name venture capital investors.
The deal with ZENN Motor and a $3 million investment by the venture capital group Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which made big-payoff early bets on companies like Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., hint that EEStor may be on the edge of a breakthrough technology, a ''game changer'' as Clifford put it.
A game changer advance in batteries would revolutionize transportation and make the coming of "Peak Oil" a small problem. The cost of electric power for electrically powered travel is cheap. A low cost technology that makes electric cars feasible will enable nuclear, solar, and wind power to push our vehicles down the road for two or three pennies per mile.
An article by Chris Vernon at The Oil Drum notes we are close to the era of electric cars and that suggests to me we are close to the era of battery usage to store and provide home electricity.
The A123 Systems battery can charge to 90% capacity after approximately 2300 charges (86% after 3800) according to this graph.
These numbers are revolutionary. Even if your car has a small battery pack (plugin hybrid with 40 mile range) and you only drive it in town as an electric vehicle your battery is going to last 40x2300 miles (an amazing 86,000 miles on PHEV power alone) and the car will still go to 90% of the distance it could on a charge when new (36 miles instead of 40)! It seems the battery will outlast the life of the typical car on the road today. If your car is an electric car (with more batteries) and you can do 150 miles a charge it will be 90% as good-as-new after an astounding 345,000 miles! 2300 charges at one charge a day is also more than 6 years. The Phoenix SUT uses Altair Nano's battery and is expected to last 250,000 miles / 12+ years.
I see old PHEV car batteries eventually getting reallocated for use to store electricity for homes. Electricity collected when the wind blows or the sun shines will go into lithium ion car batteries that might have lost 30% or even 40% of their original charge capacity. But the remaining capacity will make a substantial difference to enable people to shift electric power from when it is cheap to generate to when they want to use it.
Suppose we see major volumes of pluggable hybrid electric vehicles onsale within 4 years. Seems plausible. GM is aiming for 2010 with their Volt car. Suppose it takes them till 2011. A Volt might go 20 years before its too old and its batteries at that point will still be in pretty good shape. If the Volt can go 40 miles on a charge and uses 250 watt-hours per mile (pretty close to what it will use) then the Volt might originally have 10 kwh of capacity. Well, even if it degrades 80% it will still have 8 kwh of capacity. For a house that uses 20 kwh per day the 8 kwh of storage capacity from old car lithium nanophosphate batteries would allow shifting of a substantial chunk of solar power from day time to night. Or it would allow shifting of nuclear electric power from night to day.
A big PHEV SUV will come with twice the battery capacity as a compact to drive the same difference. So the electric SUV might start with 20 kwh of battery capacity and end up with 16 kwh of capacity by the end of vehicle life. Such a battery could operate a house for a day after a power outage if the occupants became frugal with their electric usage. Throw in a second SUV and the house could go two days on the power of the old batteries.
But we don't need to wait for the cars to wear out to start using their batteries to save and use electric power. If you know you are staying home for a few days then why not plug the car into the house and use the car battery to let you grab electricity and store it in your car when it is cheap and use it from your car when the price of electricity goes up in late in the afternoon and early evening?
Sodium-sulfur (NaS) batteries have begun to enter service for large scale stationary electric power storage.
An NaS battery, by contrast, uses a far more durable porcelain-like material to bridge the electrodes, giving it a life span of about 15 years, Mears says. It also takes up about a fifth of the space. Ford Motor pioneered the battery in the 1960s to power early-model electric cars; NGK and Tokyo Electric refined it for the power grid.
Since the 1990s, Japanese businesses have installed enough NaS batteries to light the equivalent of about 155,000 homes, says Brad Roberts, head of the Electricity Storage Association. In the USA, AEP is using the 30-foot-wide by 15-foot-high battery to supply 10% of the electricity needs of 2,600 customers in north Charleston, says Ali Nourai, AEP manager of distributed energy. The battery, which cost about $2.5 million, is charged by generators from the grid at night, when demand and prices are low, and discharged during the day when power usage peaks.
That $2.5 million cost seems high for 10% of the power for 2,600 customers. That's about $960 per customer for something that lasts 15 years. Plus, there's the cost of the electricity lost when it is stored since no battery stores and retrieves electricity with 100% efficiency..
The biggest drawback is price. The battery costs about $2,500 per kilowatt, about 10% more than a new coal-fired plant. That discourages independent wind farm developers from embracing the battery on fears it will drive the wholesale electricity prices they charge utilities above competing rates, says Christine Real de Azua, spokeswoman for the American Wind Energy Association.
It is worth noting that sodium and sulfur are very cheap with sulfur in the tens of dollars per long ton (which is 1016 kg). Sulfur prices dropped a lot in the 1990s and most marketed sulfur come from removal of sulfur from oil and other fossil fuels in refineries. Due to US regulations which went into effect in 2006 to lower sulfur content of diesel fuel refinery sulfur production is up. In a nutshell, there's plenty of cheap sulfur available for making NaS batteries.
Can the prices for large industrial NaS batteries fall? Does anyone understand the processes involved in making NaS batteries and where the big costs come from?
If ways can be found to make NaS batteries cheaply then that would tend to help nuclear, solar, and wind power. Cheap ways to store nuclear electricity would allow nuclear power generated at night to supply peak power needs during the day. This could greatly reduce the demand for peak power generated from dwindling supplies of natural gas. Batteries would also enable solar and wind power to provide electricity when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow.
Our main problem with limited remaining supplies of fossil fuels is not a simple energy shortage. Rather, our biggest problem is an energy storage shortage. That distinction is of enormous importance.
Oil produces gasoline and diesel fuels which store compactly in cars. Natural gas can get stored in tanks for use by electric utilities to generate electricity at times of peak electricity demand. Coal can get cheaply stored in big containers and carried around in train box cars for use when heat power is needed by steel mills, electric generator plants, and industrial heaters.
We have affordable alternative sources of energy but they do not store well. While photovoltaics are still too expensive nuclear and wind power are affordable without huge changes in lifestyles. Photovoltaics will eventually become affordable as well.
Solar photovoltaics, wind, and nuclear power all produce electricity that is not easily stored for use where and when it is needed. We can switch away from dwindling and increasingly expensive fossil fuels only when we can find ways to store nuclear, wind, and solar power. Therefore the development of better, cheaper, and longer lasting batteries is essential for the migration away from fossil fuels.
The shift toward electric powered cars is accelerating.
This week, General Motors (GM) announced its selection of battery makers to develop and test battery packs for use in its proposed electric vehicles. The selected battery makers, Compact Power, based in Troy, MI, and Continental Automotive Systems, based in Germany, say that they've overcome the performance and cost limitations that have been an obstacle to electric vehicles in the past.
A123 Systems will be supplying the battery cells which Continental will use to make full batteries for GM.
Pluggable hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) will allow people to recharge from a wall socket and run only on electricity on shorter trips. Though some PHEVs will require running their conventional engines at higher speeds . Then on longer trips the cars will run gasoline engines to recharge their batteries. GM will release 2 different kinds of PHEVs in 2010.
Factory-built, dealer-sold PHEVs are another story. General Motors says both an E-Flex car and a Saturn-branded plug-in, called the Vue Green Line, will be ready by 2010. The Vue, like models on the roads now, will follow a "parallel" design, in which both an electric motor and a gasoline engine drive the wheels, often working in concert. In contrast, the E-Flex cars will be "series" hybrids. Only the electric motor will turn the wheels. Then, once the battery runs low, a small engine — could be gas or diesel, or it could someday be replaced by a hydrogen fuel cell — fires to turn a generator that produces more electricity.
The auto industry expects battery costs for PHEVs and pure electric cars to drop to less than a third of current prices.
According to an industry rule of thumb, every kilowatt-hour of capacity adds about $1000 to the price of a battery. An E-Flex car, for instance, could cost $9000 to $10,000 more than a conventional gasoline-powered version of the vehicle. At least at first.
"If we're talking about 100,000 units or more, cost becomes less of an issue," says Altair head Alan Gotcher. The rough consensus among battery makers is that prices could drop to $5000 within a few years, and eventually dip below $3000.
Some "Peak Oil" doomsters see civilizational collapse in store when world oil production peaks and declines. But the advances in battery car technology makes that scenario unlikely. In 5 years time we will have millions of PHEV and pure electric vehicles. If we hit peak oil 5 years from now then we could shift to making only PHEV and pure electric vehicles. To generate the electricty we can use nuclear, wind, and (unfortunately) coal.
Researchers at Tonen Chemical, an affiliate of ExxonMobil Chemical based in Tokyo, Japan, have developed a new separator that plays an active role in keeping batteries from overheating. The material could make it possible to slow the reactions, allowing the battery to cool off rather than bursting into flame, says Peter Roth, program manager for advanced technology development at Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque, NM. Sandia is now testing the safety features of the new separator.
Better battery technology will eventually cause electricity rather than liquid hydrocarbons to power most vehicle movement. Liquid fuel will get used mostly for longer trips. Batteries will power most shorter trips.
A Wall Street Journal article reports how much Detroit car company attitudes have shifted on batteries. American car companies feel an urgent need for leading edge domestic lithium ion battery suppliers.
Facing growing pressure to curtail greenhouse-gas emissions, U.S. auto makers are increasingly worried that the critical battery technology they'll need to compete is getting locked up by Japanese rivals who moved more quickly to develop gas-electric hybrid vehicles.
"It's important to have the knowledge base on advanced automotive battery technology and manufacturing capacity right here locally in the U.S." says Beth Lowery, GM vice president of Environment and Energy.
One of the biggest hybrid battery suppliers is owned by the most formidable competitor of the Detroit auto industry (Toyota). The American car companies finally figured out that's a problem. Fortunately for Detroit the Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) batteries used in Toyota Priuses are a technological dead-end. The future lies with lithium ion chemistries and perhaps nanotubes and other nanotech. On that playing field US venture capital start-ups stand a good chance of winning. But a larger effort at funding university research would produce more advances in electrochemistry suitable for spinning off into VC battery start-ups.
A123 Systems is among the start-ups that are suddenly getting lots of attention from both government and corporate interests.
The U.S. Department of Energy, in collaboration with the U.S. Advanced Battery Consortium, which is made up of Detroit's three auto makers, last year awarded A123 a $15 million contract to develop its version of lithium-ion technology for hybrid-electric vehicle applications. In addition to the A123 contract, the Energy Department has requested $41 million this year to continue advanced battery research.
This is still chump change. Consider the benefits of battery advances. Sufficiently advanced battery technologies will some day enable cars to run 100 and more miles between recharges. This capability will end the use of liquid fuels for most local travel. Liquid fuels will continue to get used in longer road trips, air flights, and in ships. But for most commutes and trips to stores batteries will displace gasoline, diesel, and ethanol.
The ability to use batteries for transportation will, in turn, enable the use of nuclear, solar, geothermal, and wind power for transportation. Granted, today we are seeing a huge scaling up in the use of coal for electric generation. But that trend will end due to a combination of rising regulatory limits on emissions and dropping costs of cleaner competitors.
Smarter energy policies by governments could accelerate the development of next generation batteries and cleaner ways to generate electricity.
Milwaukee-based Johnson Controls, one of the biggest suppliers of lead acid batteries, has joined the growing list of groups attempting to produce next generation batteries. The race is on.
South Korea, China and the European Union also have government-supported advanced battery projects, according to U.S. and Japanese government officials and documents. And a joint venture between Johnson Controls and French battery cell producer SAFT, a €560 million ($751.9 million) a year maker of batteries for industrial and electronics uses, also is vying to supply GM.
A123 was founded in 2002 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Yet-Ming Chiang, former American Superconductor executive Bart Riley and entrepreneur Ric Fulop. The company, which has 250 workers compared with about 1,000 at Panasonic EV, has raised $100 million in capital from investors, including Sequoia Capital, a Menlo Park, Calif., venture capital firm, and General Electric Co.'s commercial-finance unit.
If Toyota comes out with a cheap lithium ion battery usable in pluggable hybrids and does this a few years before Detroit automakers find a supplier for such a battery then Toyota's gains in marketshare will accelerate. Both the American and European auto industries face the very real threat that an East Asian win in next gen batteries will translate into a big East Asian win in the automotive marketshare.
Kevin Bullis of MIT's Technology Review reports on views of battery researchers on the feasibility of powering cars with batteries.
Stanley Whittingham, inventor of the first commercial lithium-ion battery and professor of chemistry, materials science, and engineering at the State University of New York, at Binghamton, says current research should make electric vehicles practical--with the following caveat: they'll probably be used for trips of less than 100 miles. Those who want 300-to-400-mile ranges typical of gasoline-powered vehicles will need to turn to plug-in hybrids: vehicles much like today's gas-electric hybrids, but with a much larger battery pack that makes it possible to go longer on electric power, thereby saving gas. These batteries could be partly charged by an onboard gas engine, but also by electricity from a wall socket.
Whittingham says that while he expects battery capacity to double, it's not going to get much better than that.
But electrochemist Peter Bruce of University of Saint Andrews in Scotland thinks his experimental lithium ion battery that combines with oxygen to form lithium peroxide could more than quadruple current battery capacity.
Based on his experiments, Bruce says that such batteries could store as much as 600 to 700 milliamp hours per gram (more than four times that of batteries today) while maintaining the ability to be charged and discharged for many cycles.
Even 100 mile range would make electric cars practical for many. But to maximize the convenience of electric cars it helps to have a property that makes it easy to run a power cord to a car. Someone who parks in their own garage could plug in their car pretty easily. But someone who parks on the street and walks to an apartment will find home charging hard to do. Those who can't easily charge at home will need faster charging and higher energy storage capacity batteries to make pure electric cars practical for them.
MIT battery research Donald Sadoway (whose battery research I've previously reported on) told Technology Review in an interview in October 2005 that hydrogen fuel cells are not going to compete with batteries for vehicle power.
DS: I don't believe in fuel cells for portable power. I think it's a dumb idea. The good news is: they burn hydrogen with oxygen to produce electricity, and only water vapor is the byproduct. The bad news is: you have to deal with molecular hydrogen gas, and that's what's stymieing the research and in my opinion is always going to stymie the research.
That's why I don't work on fuel cells. Where's the infrastructure? Where are we going to get hydrogen from? Hydrogen is a molecule, it's H2. To break it apart, to get H+, you've got to go from H2 to H, and that covalent bond is very strong. To break that bond you have to catalyze the reaction, and guess what the catalyst is? It's noble metals -- platinum and palladium. Have you seen the price of platinum? Lithium [for lithium ion batteries] is expensive. But it's not like platinum. Lithium right now is probably $40 a pound. Platinum is $500 an ounce. If I could give the fuel-cell guys platinum for $40 a pound, they would be carrying me around on their shoulders until the day I die.
Sadoway thinks electric cars with longer ranges are within the realm of the possible.
Batteries suitable for electric cars would make a huge difference in our energy future. Why? Simple: Batteries would allow all energy sources that can generate electricity to power vehicles. Nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, coal will all become energy sources for transportation when batteries improve enough to make electric cars competitive.
An article in MIT's Technology Review reports on the potential of thin film batteries to replace lithium ion batteries and to make electric cars feasible.
These new batteries replace the liquid or gel electrolyte with thin layers of solid glass-like or polymer materials, which are more stable. "Nothing can leak, nothing can freeze, nothing can boil, rupture, or explode," says Tim Bradow, vice president of business development at Infinite Power Solutions of Golden, CO, a leading developer of thin-film batteries.
All those recent exploding and burning laptop battery stories do not mean we've hit a technological limit in battery development. Thin film batteries will lower costs, increase safety, and increase capacity all at the same time.
MIT battery researcher Donald Sadoway says the use of solid electrolytes allows the use of pure lithium in the battery anode and this maximizes the amount of electricity that can be stored. Plus, this approach is amenable to use of a much lower cost manufacturing process.
In contrast to the glass-like electrolyte used by Infinite Power Solutions and others, Sadoway has developed a solid-polymer electrolyte (today's lithium-ion polymer batteries use a gel) for use in thin-film batteries. This electrolyte, he says, could be processed in rolls like newspaper, or some other high-throughput process. Such a process for thin-film batteries, although not now being developed by industry, could bring down costs, he says, while innovative ways of packaging electrodes could reduce size. "We've made batteries in the laboratory that are 300 watt-hours per kilogram," he says. "That's two times the best lithium-ion [battery] on the market today."
Low cost and high capacity could open the door to electric cars. Electric cars could end our dependence on liquid fuels for ground transportation. This would allow nuclear, coal, solar, and wind to compete directly oil, gasoline, and diesel fuel.
Note that battery energy storage capacity does not have to equal the energy content of gasoline or even of ethanol in order to make electric cars that will go as far on a charge as a car can go on a tank of gasoline. A shift to pure electric vehicles would allow the elimination of a heavy engine and a heavy transmission. Some of the weight budget currently allocated to the drivetrain could instead go to batteries. Then the car could be powered by electric motors located in each wheel.No need for a transmission and axle to turn the wheels.
An MIT team has made an important advance in battery technology for hybrid vehicles.
Researchers at MIT have developed a new type of lithium battery that could become a cheaper alternative to the batteries that now power hybrid electric cars.
Until now, lithium batteries have not had the rapid charging capability or safety level needed for use in cars. Hybrid cars now run on nickel metal hydride batteries, which power an electric motor and can rapidly recharge while the car is decelerating or standing still.
But lithium nickel manganese oxide, described in a paper to be published in Science on Feb. 17, could revolutionize the hybrid car industry -- a sector that has "enormous growth potential," says Gerbrand Ceder, MIT professor of materials science and engineering, who led the project.
"The writing is on the wall. It's clearly happening," said Ceder, who said that a couple of companies are already interested in licensing the new lithium battery technology.
Their success came from making the material have a more crystalline structure.
Lithium ions carry the battery's charge, so to maximize the speed at which the battery can charge and discharge, the researchers designed and synthesized a material with a very ordered crystalline structure, allowing lithium ions to freely flow between the metal layers.
The battery still costs too much to manufacture.
A battery made from the new material can charge or discharge in about 10 minutes -- about 10 times faster than the unmodified lithium nickel manganese oxide. That brings it much closer to the timeframe needed for hybrid car batteries, Ceder said.
Before the material can be used commercially, the manufacturing process needs to be made less expensive, and a few other modifications will likely be necessary, Ceder said.
Unfortunately the press release provides no indication of how the storage density compares to the nickel metal hydride (NiMH) batteries currently used in cars.
Note that this MIT group is not the only team pursuing better lithium batteries for hybrids. President Bush's recent big speech on energy policy was made at Johnson Controls in Milwaukee. Well, Johnson Controls is pursuing lithium ion batteries for hybrid vehicles.
MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN (September 28, 2005) – Johnson Controls today launched an advanced lithium-ion battery development laboratory in Milwaukee, to create advanced power-storage solutions for near-future, hybrid-electric vehicles (HEVs). The facility – located at the company’s Battery Technology Center – features a “dry room” and an array of highly specialized tools and equipment for designing, developing and testing power-storage and power-management concepts based on lithium-ion technology.
The new laboratory facility and development equipment were installed at a cost of approximately $4 million.
Johnson Controls, the world’s largest manufacturer of automotive original equipment and aftermarket batteries, has been at the forefront of research and development activities to create enhanced batteries for future-generation HEVs. The company operates battery technology centers in the United States and Europe.
For more than a decade, Johnson Controls has supplied nickel-metal-hydride batteries for hybrid-vehicle applications in Europe. The company believes lithium ion technology is likely to replace nickel-metal-hydride as the battery technology of choice in hybrid-electric and electric vehicles in the future.
With the big players in the auto industry all pursuing hybrid vehicle development a lot of money is flowing into development of better hybrid vehicle batteries. The shift to hybrids is driving battery technology advances which will eventually culminate in pure electric vehicles. We'll go to hybrids and then to pluggable hybrids and then to pure electric vehicles.
My guess is that the money flowing through the auto industry for battery development means that batteries will be ready for storing solar electric power long before photovoltaics become cheap enough to provide a significant source of electricity that needs storage.