Uncle Sam's boffins stumble upon battery storage holy grail According to the head of ARPA-E – the research arm of the US Department of Energy – a number of breakthroughs in battery technology have been achieved, with huge implications on the use of renewable energy and electric cars. Speaking at an ARPA-E event in Washington DC this week, director Dr Ellen Williams told an interviewer …
"If you charge your phone for an hour can you make an hour-long call? Like fuck you can, it'll be lucky to give you 15 minutes. Same for a car.
I are physicist. What you?
A chartered electrical engineer."
I am neither a physicist nor a chartered electrical engineer, but my phone takes a little over three hours to charge and a 1 hour 3g phone call drops the battery charge by typically 10%.
Reminds me of an account many years ago in Wireless World about some poly lecturers arguing in the lab about the phase of the AC voltage out from a coil with co-wound primary and secondary. It took some time before one of them went and got some wire, some ferrite, and hooked it up to a signal generator and an oscilloscope.
"Never mind the physics, what the eff is that supposed to mean?
Precisely what it says. You need to charge for 'n' hours to use it for 'm'. The ratio of n to m is much worse than 1:1. If you charge your phone for an hour can you make an hour-long call? Like fuck you can, it'll be lucky to give you 15 minutes. Same for a car.
I are physicist. What you?
A chartered electrical engineer."
Who doesn't know about battery charging. Most battery types can be fast charged at C1 which is full charge amount in an hour, although you do lose some in heat at that rate so not 100% charged and the final bit to full charge need to be done slower with li-ion types. So if your battery can last an hour for a call you can charge it in an hour. Providing you are charging at C1. Which is why you need those 2A USB power supplies to charge your phone quickly and takes a lot longer when you plug it in to computer standard USB port is probably only supplying 500mA
If your battery can give you 2 hours call time on full charge. It's a lot easier to get it 50% charged in an hour for an hour call time as you aren't needing to do the final slower bit to get to 100%.
Ahh, a chartered electrical engineer... met them before!
Who says you have to charge at the same rate you're using the battery!? If I charge my phone for an hour it works for a day and a half ....quite possibly the charger is charging at many more W/hr than the phone uses.....
HND electrical engineer
"Ahh, a chartered electrical engineer... met them before!"
Be grateful he wasn't a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology. I've had the pleasure of working near a couple of them whilst working a a well known blue chip outfit. One was a nice chap who was encouraging as many people as poss to get Chartered, whilst offering zero support in terms of time or funding to make it happen. The other one was just a downright liar who was dangerously clueless on his chosen specialist subject.
There may be some perfectly decent ones elsewhere too, who don't stick out like sore thumbs.
If the IET has a mechanism for disqualifying the incapable, I'd love to hear about it.
If the IET has a mechanism for disqualifying the incapable, I'd love to hear about it.
It's not up to the IET. Chartered status is conferred/removed by the Engineering Council, see http://www.engc.org.uk/
Membership or Fellowship of a professional institution like the IET is only one of the criteria. Proven continuing professional development is another.
Proven continuing professional development is another (criterion)
Not if you're old enough, it isn't. I think I could have got it through grandfathered rights up to about 10 years ago, but it was just too much hassle. You just needed a degree or equiv and proven capability for 4+ years or so.
I went to a session plugging it at Savoy Place, but the eejits at the IEE (as it then was) didn't get back to me, I couldn't be arsed to chase, and chartered status makes f-all difference to me and those I work with/for now. I eschew vendor quals too.....
As an aside, isn't the IET magazine a comic these days ?? I read better analysis and more correct tech in El Reg
"Forget the maths, do the physics."
Do you realize what you just said? Doing physics without math is like cooking without food.
"You're looking at charging:use ratios well below 1:1."
A charging:use ratio well below 1:1 would be very good. A use:charging ratio below 1:1 would not.
Doing physics without math is like cooking without food.
Which is what I'm told most people do given that supermarkets specialise in food-like substances rather than food. The local supermarket "The Fresh Food People" does sell vegetables, though describing them as "fresh" is very much an exaggeration.
the same fluid used for storing energy from renewables for use when they are not producing can be used in an automobile . . . this would further increase the incentive to use renewables which could make up for the gap in production from the extra demand from electric automobiles.
as for recharging at home, just keep a few gallons of the fluid in a can somewhere at home (i think some (all?) of them are even non-flammable) and with some clever kit you could probably reprocess it back to it's original energy content for the next use or just take it back to the station and swap it for usable.
i'm seeing this technology used like filling stations are used now but with a slight difference . . . when you connect to the pump you need two hoses, one to suck out the used fluid tank and one to fill the fresh fluid tank.
"Also, electric vehicles can be charged at home, which (for most of us, anyway) can't be said of petrol-powered ones."
That's great - IF you have your own off-street parking area. If you don't, and are forced to park on a public road, then you're pretty screwed, aren't you? I often have to park my car more than 100 meters from my house, so that makes charging at home impossible. At least if my petrol car runs out of fuel, I can walk to the nearest petrol station and return with a can of go-juice. What am I supposed to do with an electric vehicle? Run back and forth with rechargeable AA batteries?
If you live in a flat, and are lucky enough to have allocated parking, there would be a significant disruption and huge costs involved to get 3-phase 63A power points to every parking spot. For comparison, the average UK home only has a 60-100A single phase supply, so the electricity company is looking at effectively doubling the potential supply current to each and every house, plus retrofitting each house with 3-phase instead of single phase.
So any kind of vehicle that requires home charging, would require the right kind of house to go with it!
"
Also, electric vehicles can be charged at home, which (for most of us, anyway) can't be said of petrol-powered ones.
"
The energy required to recharge a battery enough to do 100 miles in the average electric car will be about 40kWh. That's quite a bit of power to be using from your home mains supply, but if you charge overnight for 12 hours it is just about do-able via a standard 13A socket.
If however you want significantly more than 100 miles worth of power, and if you want to charge it more quickly, you'll find that it quickly reaches currents that your house supply will not be able to accommodate. e.g. to charge for a 300 mile range in 2 hours would need a 240V supply rated at 250 amps - that's more than the wires entering most houses can carry.
Even overnight charging will be problematic if everyone in the neighbourhood has an electric car. All those cars charging at the same time will almost certainly overload the local substation.
Even if a car battery were to be developed that could be charged from flat in, say, 15 minutes (which I'd say is the longest you'd want to wait to refuel on a long journey), the national grid would not be able to supply the refuelling stations without a huge upgrade. To recharge just 10 cars at once, each with an 100kWh battery, would need a power drain from the grid of around 4 MW.
Swapping out the battery at the service station is really the only practical model (in which case charging time does not matter), with the flat batteries being physically shipped to a central power station for recharging. Each battery could have a tamper-proof monitor so that customers only pay for the amount of electricity that they had used from the battery they were swapping.
"The energy required to recharge a battery enough to do 100 miles in the average electric car will be about 40kWh. "
Reference welcome, but it sounds the right order of magnitude.
"If however you want significantly more than 100 miles worth of power"
Then you're not in the foreseeable market for an affordable electric car.
"overnight charging will be problematic if everyone in the neighbourhood has an electric car. "
See above. There is no currently foreseeable situation where electric vehicle penetration will become numerically significant, let alone "everyone in the neighbourhood". Therefore the availability of power for charging is unlikely to be a problem for the foreseeable future.
"Swapping out the battery at the service station is really the only practical model (in which case charging time does not matter),"
Apparently Tesla tried it and no one was interested?
http://fortune.com/2015/06/10/teslas-battery-swap-is-dead/
The energy required to recharge a battery enough to do 100 miles in the average electric car will be about 40kWh. That's quite a bit of power to be using from your home mains supply, but if you charge overnight for 12 hours it is just about do-able via a standard 13A socket.
Interesting... Back in the 1920s, Jack Hodge drove from Zeehan to Hobart via Burnie and Launceston in 14 hours. He was the first to do so. Most thought him mad, there being no proper roads at the time. That 300 mile trip based on your figures would be ~6 hours drive time plus two 12 hour recharging stops for a total of 30 hours. And presumably two nights of accommodation costs. That's progress for you ;-)
Oh yes, Tasmania is a much smaller state than any other in Australia.
I'm not against EVs, just the rather silly idea that they are practical outside of cities.
"I'm not against EVs, just the rather silly idea that they are practical outside of cities."
For someone outside a city whose kids school is five miles away and whose nearest shops are ten miles away and where (obviously) public transport is not an option, why isn't an electric vehicle a perfectly adequate short-journey car? Lots of other vehicles don't make sense (from a practicality point of view) for longer journeys but people still buy/use them, because they fit a particular set of requirements.
In many ways, cities with adequate public transport are the last places where electric cars should make sense.
For someone outside a city whose kids school is five miles away and whose nearest shops are ten miles away and where (obviously) public transport is not an option
While it may seem obvious to you that public transport is not an option, it doesn't seem so obvious to me. When the Gitling was going to school, the school bus passed within 300 yards of the farmhouse. When I was going to high school in rural Victoria in the 60s the school buses brought students from up to 20 miles away. When I was in the IT biz, I commuted to the city 30 miles away by bus. There are seven spanning a 12 hour period on weekdays and they pass about a mile away from the farm.
Mrs Git and I share a single vehicle and while it's main use is commuting to her work 40 miles away, it's also used for long intrastate trips. She occasionally needs to travel to a city over 150 miles away. That's likely impractical in an EV especially since it would require an overnight recharge at the very least. In the Subaru Forester she drives there and back again the same day.
I'm not at all sure that an EV would be up to the sort of driving conditions a rugged vehicle like the Subaru takes in its stride. Have you ever heard of anyone pulling a pasture harrow with a Tesla or a trailer load of firewood from the bush? Then there's the occasions when you decide to purchase a ram at the stockyard and take it home. My best friend in high school was a farm boy. His dad purchased a ram at the Royal Melbourne Show and took it home in the Jaguar. He punched a few holes in the boot lid with a pick axe so it didn't suffocate. Not too many people would do that I know, but the ram did cost more than the Jag.
I do take your point about public transport in cities though.
"I'm not at all sure that an EV would be up to the sort of driving conditions a rugged vehicle like the Subaru takes in its stride"
Is anyone even suggesting this kind of thing?
Choose the right tool for the job. Perhaps from a different range of tools than we have today. But many of them will, at least in the medium term, be very similar. Including the farm vehicles.
"it may seem obvious to you that public transport is not an option"
In the modern UK, public transport doesn't run unless there's a profit (from passengers or from subsidy). Thus much of the country has no useful public transport.
"seven [buses] spanning a 12 hour period on weekdays "
That's about the service my former employers said was acceptable, for shift workers, on a site just outside a big city. No service at all at weekends. The sites they were leaving had buses every few minutes from 6am ish (before early shift started) to after 10pmish when late shift finished, Saturdays and Sundays included.
Is anyone even suggesting this kind of thing?
Assuming you are the same AC who responded to my previous comment, you suggested that public transport wasn't available to me as a rural dweller. I pointed out that your suggestion was incorrect. I live in rural Tasmania, not UKLand. You also suggested that an EV for transporting kids to school and shopping. That too was a foolish suggestion because while the Subaru is entirely capable of doing such, and isn't required for schoolchild transporting anyway, it would not be suitable for several other uses to which the Subaru is put. Not to put to fine a point on this, even if we could afford to purchase a vehicle for the sole purpose of shopping, we'd do what we do now and purchase another property. It's our superannuation scheme.
One of the problems we country folk have is you townies telling us what we should be doing while being profoundly ignorant of what rural life entails. Of course when you move to the countryside and actually try your ideas out we generally get a good laugh.
You stick to your locality, Tasmania (population half a million, public transport allegedly available in the middle of nowhere), and I'll stick to mine, the UK (population a hundred or so times more than Tasmania, public transport frequently barely exists outside major urban areas), thanks.
population half a million, public transport allegedly available in the middle of nowhere
I don't know why you are alleging I live in the "middle of nowhere; I certainly have never said any such thing. Here's the bus timetable to verify my claim:
www.tassielink.com.au/_literature_145145/Huon_Valley_Timetable
I live on the outskirts of Franklin, pop. 326 (2011 census). We have 2 gourmet restaurants, 3 pubs (one of which serves food), a wine bar, a fish and chippy/pizzeria, a town hall that was larger than Hobart's when it was built, a post office, primary school, wooden boat building school, an old folks home (used to be the hospital) and a bowls club.
And here's a picture of "the middle of nowhere":
http://www.smod.com.au/Images/galleries/1378213155.jpg
The Git will be sticking to his locality. UKLand has nothing to offer that I desire.
I'm not at all sure that an EV would be up to the sort of driving conditions a rugged vehicle like the Subaru takes in its stride.
If anything, an EV could be built to be *more* capable, since you tend to have more precise control over torque generation, for example. The mechanical bits of the car could be very similar, with electronics checking for wheel slip and changing power output near-instantaneously.
Whether or not they would build such a vehicle is another matter, and depends entirely on whether or not a market exists for it.
Vic.
"Or for car batteries, instead of charging there's the concept of hot-swapping - which might make the charge time moot for some drivers"
A company called Better Place tired that idea but went bankrupt. It seems that people want to own their own battery rather than be part of a battery sharing service. I suspect this has some deep psychological routes as most people seem to prefer owning cars to using a ride sharing service.
The other problem is that if everyone is relying on battery swapping then you'd need as many battery swapping stations as a modern city has petrol stations. The cost of building this, and having batteries waiting around everywhere could be huge.
I think a solution would be to have a bay at the back of the car with no battery in it, but where one could be robotically attached for longer trips out of town. Then you'd only need battery swapping stations in a ring around the edge of a city and on some intercity highways. You'd drop the battery off at the next city or on your way back to your home city.
I know I shouldn't have gone there, but just for the lulz I visited your website. In one essay (Nullius in Verba, presumably yours) I found:
"Uranium has a half life of 4.5 billion years in laboratory conditions but the decay rate is unknown and unpredictable in the Earths molten mantle"
This assertion tells me who is the faux scientist in one sentence.
Mike, that is the conventional wisdom, given the relative differences in the strengths of the electro-magnetic forces and the nuclear weak force. When actually tested, you know, like empirical science is supposed to, it has been found that some elements (no I dont have list to hand) do seem to increase in decay rate under very high pressure. Only one report so I await followup testing. Scepticism of all claims is a virtue IMHO. Whether site is faux is irrelevant to its testable claims.
Even accepting (which of course I don't) the second half of the sentence in the quoted assertion, it's still faux science, because the first half of the sentence doesn't tell us (other than by implcation) which isotope of Uranium is being referred to.
"This assertion tells me who is the faux scientist in one sentence."
Agreed, but to play devil's advocate for a second, there is probably a much higher amount of radioactivity in the mantle than in a lab, so the decay rate may be different due to nuclear bombardment (at which point you could legitimately say that it's a different isotope so his entire 4.5 billion year comment is guff anyway). But I'm taking his comment out of context because I'd rather read the comments here than read his article.
> "Uranium has a half life of 4.5 billion years in laboratory conditions but the decay rate is unknown and unpredictable in the Earths molten mantle"
Who would that be?
In the presence of vanadium and or chromium, the earth could easily be making Uranium for all that anyone knows. What little we do know is that specialised iron eating bugs live and work down there and Uranium is in the family belonging to Iron if not the family belonging to iron eating bugs.
less than $10 – a fifth of the price of gasoline
Only because gasoline for road use is taxed much more than electricty. At present.
a matter of how quickly you could get the energy into the car
Which is one place where flow-technology batteries might actually be useful. If recharging became simply a case of draining the used electrolyte and refilling with fresh, refuelling could be as quick and easy as it is today for gasoline vehicles. Small filling stations could be refilled by tanker using a similar system, larger ones with good grid access might have on-site electrolyte recharging facilities. It would be interesting to see numbers on fluid quantity versus range.
At last - someone who realises that the energy in a flow battery system is stored in the electrolyte! So, yes, just fill up with new electrolyte, and the spent stuff can be recycled. We need to get away from the thinking that electric vehicles need to be powered by something "like an AA battery, but better"
"Only because gasoline for road use is taxed much more than electricty. At present."
Around 80% of UK pump price is tax. The rest is crude oil, transport and refining costs.
IE: the real price is about 1/5 of what you pay at the pump.
Expect to find that road charges of some sort are rapidly introduced when EVs become the norm.
The UK government is _not_ going to give up £60billion/year in income without a fight
Hot swapping was mooted in my Usborne book about electricity a generation or more ago - and expected twenty years ago. Works well enough for gas canisters etc, why not batteries? "Just" requires standardisation as the main hurdle.
"Just" requires standardisation as the main hurdle.
No, that's the easy bit.
All those swapped-out batteries have to be stored somewhere they can be charged, ready to be swapped back in again. Work out how many cars a typical petrol station refuels in a 24-hour period, and then calculate how much space and electrical power you'll need to store and charge that many batteries, while venting off the surplus heat so your charging station doesn't go up in flames like an apple charger.
No problem. You won't actually store the batteries at the swap point for long. Every five minutes you'll launch an Amazon drone to carry a load of car batteries to the charging station in Alaska where the heat dissipation won't be an issue.
Gas canisters slowly degrade over their lifetime, with no loss in storage capacity, until the very end.
Batteries degrade over a much shorter lifetime, with huge losses in storage capacity
So when you truck up to the motorway services wanting to swap out your brand new lovingly cared for battery you might just be getting a real shag nasty replacement with a hundred miles off your range.
To make it work would require some kind of charge counter embedded in the battery, or a customer readable testing meter, coupled with a discounting scheme for those batteries that have degraded.
The only way I've been able to imagine a system that works is one where you don't own the hot swap batteries the hot swap company does. You have a service subscription to them based on your usage. Whenever you swing into a station, they give you a fresh pack, recharge the old ones, and do the inspection for old check. Then they pull the near EOL ones and replace them. It also "solves" the problem of disposing of the old one because now the company instead of the end user is responsible for it. I used scare quotes because obviously it doesn't solve the problem of how to process the thousands of batteries that would be going through such a system if even 50% of cars were electric.
Hot swapping was mooted in my Usborne book about electricity a generation or more ago - and expected twenty years ago. Works well enough for gas canisters etc, why not batteries? "Just" requires standardisation as the main hurdle.
I think it very much depends on implementation. I personally would be uncomfortable with frequent replacements of something that is part of the structural strength of the car as it is with a Tesla, and there's also the question of quality control and the fairly involved mechanics to make it happen. Running just a few power lines is probably less involved than to add a lot of mechanics to it.
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