GM's Volt. Tesla's Roadster. Nissan's Leaf. The era of the electric car is finally arriving, when we can depend on plentiful and cheap electricity to get us to where we want to go, rather than relying on increasingly expensive and scarce oil.
As exciting as this new auto age is, though, all you have to do is study the numbers to realize we're still taking baby steps. The Tesla Roadster gets around 200 miles between recharges, but it also costs $129,000. The Volt and Leaf are more affordable, but only get around 40 miles and 100 miles respectively per charge. For most Americans, these mileage and price limitations are deal breakers. Rather than a mass-market replacement for the family car, the first generation of electric cars is an interesting innovation for early adaptors.
The real electric car revolution won't happen until we solve questions about range, how to recharge them and make cars that everyone can afford.
At IBM, one way we're tackling these challenges is the ambitious Battery 500 Project. The goal? Develop lightweight, rechargeable batteries that can power cars for 500 miles without being recharged and that don't break the bank either.
With the Battery 500 Project, we're completely rethinking the power source for the electric car. The current generation of electric cars runs on lithium ion batteries, the kind of batteries that power laptops or iPhones.
Manufacturers are slowly improving the performance and reducing the costs of lithium ion batteries. But these batteries are still too heavy and expensive for electric vehicle cars to go mainstream. When it comes to energy density - the amount of power a battery can deliver for its size and weight - even lithium ion batteries are pipsqueaks compared to a tank of gasoline.
So researchers around the world are working on new chemistries such as Metal-air batteries. These batteries already power millions of very small devices. The challenge is to make them rechargeable and big enough for cars. Metal-air batteries have much higher energy densities than lithium-ion batteries -- which could translate into 500 miles of range per charge using a reasonably sized and hopefully affordable battery. But make no mistake, this may be as big a technical challenge as the moon landing once was. We are making good progress in our laboratories. This is only our second year of work on Lithium/Air batteries at IBM Research, yet we're getting cautiously optimistic and expect to show a large laboratory prototype within the next two years.
The pay-off, if successful, could transform economies and have major impact on our oil use because 70 percent of all oil used in the United States is burned in cars and trucks, whereas virtually no oil is being used in generating electricity.
Cheaper, lighter car batteries, though, are just one part of the equation. For electric vehicles to proliferate, we also have to have a system for charging them.
The good news is that a powerful 600 gigawatt electrical grid is already in place and for the next few years, the grid can easily handle electric cars. But the long term presents challenges.
The current model of gasoline cars, where one drives up to a station and leaves a few minutes later with enough gasoline aboard to drive several hundred miles, cannot be transferred to electric cars. It would take a huge, multi-megawatt power-line to do an equivalent feat for an electric car. But there is an alternative: 54 percent of all U.S. households have access to a garage where a slow, low-cost overnight charge is feasible. Combined with a long range battery, this will provide a user friendly experience, and the electric grid needs to be only mildly upgraded for at-home charging since the demand for electricity at night is so low.
For the remainder of the population it will be necessary to install new charging stations - at work, shopping malls and parking lots. But higher stress on the grid during the day could make this difficult, expensive and restrict driving ranges. Smarter management of grids will help to deal with these issues. Fortunately, time is on our side.
America pioneered the car culture, but it must change significantly over the next two decades. Now we have the opportunity to stake out a new future for the automobile that will improve our lives, create new industries, reduce dependency on oil and improve the lives of people around the world. It is one of the biggest opportunities of our lifetime - let's make good use of it.
infrastructure. In other words, don't hold your breath.
Second, IF Dck Weir at EESTOR is truly on to something, it could be a game-changer that would make electric cars a real, practical alternative. For those of us who HAVE been holding our breath
for this Supercapacitor technology....positive progress reports are needed NOW.
As automakers develop the necessary expertise in power electronics, they will switch to more economical induction motors, ideally polyphase induction motors such as the Chorus MeshCon, which uses harmonic waveforms as a kind of electrical gearbox to generate excellent starting torque and high top speed from the same motor.
MASSIVE GOVERNMENT INVESTMENT TO SPUR RESEARCH AND BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT.
Every single industry this country ever had, except for real estate and finance, the non-industries that gave us the crappy bubble that popped and soaked us all, has been driven forward with massive investment from government. You and I would not be blogging at 11 pm on a Friday night if not for government orders from thousands of little and big companies in the 20th century, stimulating the greatest tech developments yet. Raise the corporate tax rate again so reinvestment, not offshoring of wealth, becomes the norm again. COME ON!
Oh, let me see. Perhaps it was the billions and billions of dollars invested since the beginning of the 20th Century in something called public highways, without which the growth and/or success of what we call the auto industry would have been a whole different ball game. Guess you missed that one.
spqusq below is right - it is an outmoded system. We need to move to rail.
We do not need any more power plants for a long time. There is enough grid capacity for at least 60 million electric cars, even more if we add in green energy, which we need anyway.
The panels on my roof did not destroy 'many, many acres of land". It is great, ABSOLUTELY GREAT!, to be able to generate your own clean energy, right on your own rooftop.
Yeah, we should add rail too, but we need to replace the gasoline burning automobiles with electrics as much and as soon as possible.
Horse-hockey.
Your car required a not-insubstantial amount of oil to build. It rides on a pathway made of oil called asphalt that has to be constantly rebuilt. Your car rolls on tires that use an average of 7 gallons of oil per tire. The paint and the rubber/plastic bumpers are all made out of oil. There's the environmental cost of junking your car. There's the rape of the planet to pull up all the steel, copper and aluminum components. And as KatK points out, the vast majority of EV's will need to be plugged into an electric grid.
And while all the EV geeks are getting all excited about the wonders of the new batteries, the US has a rail system that would've been a national embarrassment in 1940. Our suburban sprawl building pattern makes mass transit nearly impossible. Our trading competitors are building high-speed rail and (for the most part) moving away from car ownership.
The car is not the future of this country--a nation of Wal-Mart greeters and waitresses aren't going to make enough to qualify for car loans. Two states have already thrown in the towel and announced they can't maintain state roads and will convert some roads to gravel. What good are cars if there are no high-grade highways?
And Peak oil issues are part of a larger conundrum--all the energy solutions for peak oil being touted (EV's, solar and wind, etc) require an oil-fueled economy. The creation of hundreds of millions of EV's plus building a new generation wind-turbines and solar panels require rare earth metals, which require lots of energy to get at. The energy return on the increasingly marginal coal we're pulling up isn't going to break even once the new oil-fueled technologies to get it out aren't available. Nuclear is in the same boat--once the waste stream is factored in, nuclear returns less energy than solar and wind.
The EV geeks are congratulating themselves for 'thinking outside the box', but it's a con. A real think-outside-the-box approach is selling off the car for a cargo bike, moving to a mass transit hub, and advocating for a real national rail system.
Yes, the modern EV revolution is still in its infancy. Yes, better and cheaper batteries would be a boon to the EV revolution. And, while we are on the subject of what is patently obvious, it would be nice if we figured out how to solve the engineering problems behind harnessing fusion power, achieved world peace, learned how to live forever, and figured out how to travel to the stars.
"To be continued." (g)
You can go for the pipe dream battery or you can lightweight the cars. Making the batteries easily removable, eliminates the recharge and range problem.
Driver Mirko Hannemann, the chief of DBM Energy, drove the distance at 90 km/h (55 miles per hour) on average, had the heat on and was able to whisk around a few more miles in the city. When the A2 electric finished, it still had 18% of the initial electric charge in the battery.
　
It has a lithium-metal-polymer battery. DBM Energy, the company that built the battery and electric motors into the Audi A2, said the battery would function for 500,000 kilometres.
　
A representative of the car said the Audi still featured all the usual creature comforts such as power steering, air-conditioning and even heated seats as well, so it was not like the car was especially made for long distance record attempts
　
　
The battery, based on what DBM Energy calls the KOLIBRI AlphaPolymer Technology, comes with 97 percent efficiency and can be charged at virtually every socket. Plugged into a high-voltage direct-current source, the battery can be fully loaded within 6 minutes
　
What's more important, the technology which made the trip possible is available today.
　
German Economics Minister Rainer Bruederle, who subsidized the drive, said it showed electric cars are not utopian but really work.
Hate to burst your bubble, but the Chinese now control 97% of the rare earth metals market. They're using this control as an economic weapon--when a Chinese ship crashed into a Japanese ship last month and the Japanese coast guard detained the captain, the Chinese put an embargo on all sales of rare earth metals to Japan. No rare earth metals, no Prius.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/opinion/18krugman.html?_r=1
The Chinese are making it clear that they will use their position as king of rare earth metal production to benefit their own industries first--they are threatening to stop selling rare earth metals except in finished products made in China. And with monopoly pricing, they can keep the rest of the world dependent on their own work. This problem makes our previous problems with OPEC look like small potatoes.
The new generation of electric cars use lithium batteries and multi-phase AC induction motors. They don't rely so much on rare earth metals.
"In fact, the Toyota Prius is the single “biggest user of rare earths of any object in the world,†according to Jack Lifton, an independent commodities consultant and strategic metals expert. The Prius motor alone uses 2.2 pounds of neodymium and each Prius battery uses around 25 pounds of lanthanum."
http://gas2.org/2009/09/10/the-world-has-enough-lithium-for-electric-cars-its-the-other-bits-were-short-on/
Lithium isn't the issue--it's all the other materials. The only exception is the Tesla motor. But the Volt and the Leaf and the Prius are all big users of rare earth metals besides lithium.
Hate to burst your bubble, but there are plenty of recently discovered sources of rare earth metals not under Chinese control that could be brought on line pretty quickly if the Chinese get too abusive with their stocks. You're pedaling, if not a false, at least a quite temporary crisis.
And again, the problem isn't the materials per se--the problem is that Americans are using all their creative juices to keep the cars running. For the money we're dumping into EV research, we could be rebuilding our rail network and retrofitting suburbia for mass transit--both would have more lasting effects on our energy footprint.