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* 威派VPN - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.autos/t/54846e9a2f121ecc?hl=en
* Waiting For A REAL New ELECTRIC CAR? Hold Your Breath At Your Own Risk! - 2
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http://groups.google.com/group/alt.autos/t/6aee826396541a0a?hl=en
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TOPIC: 威派VPN
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.autos/t/54846e9a2f121ecc?hl=en
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== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Wed, Jun 22 2011 7:07 pm
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TOPIC: Waiting For A REAL New ELECTRIC CAR? Hold Your Breath At Your Own Risk!
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.autos/t/6aee826396541a0a?hl=en
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== 1 of 2 ==
Date: Sun, Jun 26 2011 10:34 am
From: Clarence Thomas
"In the early 1970s, the first lithium-based battery that worked at
room temperature had the potential to upend the entire energy
business. [But] That didn't happen. Soon came a recession, an oil
glut, and the election of Ronald Reagan, which ended a great deal of
government funding for research into advanced energy projects."
---------------------------------
"Better Batteries Will Save the World"
"Too bad they're impossible to make"
By Farhad Manjoo
Slate
June 21, 2011
Will batteries ever be able to compete with the stored power of
gasoline?
In the early 1970s, the research arm of Exxon hired a promising young
engineer named Michael Stanley Whittingham and asked him to invent
something--anything--that could reduce the company's dependence on crude
oil. Whittingham and a team holed up at an Exxon R & D lab in New
Jersey, and, as engineers are wont to do, started mixing together
chemicals to see what would happen. When they injected potassium into
the rare metal tantalum, they noticed something extraordinary--the
resulting mixture had an extremely high capacity to store energy.
Over the next few months they continued tinkering with various metals.
Whittingham's team replaced tantalum with titanium, and because
potassium was hazardous to work with, they switched it for lithium.
When they were done, Whittingham raced to Exxon's headquarters to
report to the board that they'd created something amazing. It was the
first lithium-based battery that worked at room temperature, and it
had the potential to upend the entire energy business.
Of course, that didn't happen. Soon came a recession, an oil glut, and
the election of Ronald Reagan, which ended a great deal of government
funding for research into advanced energy projects. Exxon licensed
Whittingham's battery technology and closed off the division. And for
a while, the dream of a perfect battery that could replace gasoline
was, once again, dead.
This is how it goes in the battery business.
As Seth Fletcher, a senior editor at Popular Science, recounts in his
engaging new book Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cars,
and the New Lithium Economy, scientists have been trying to build a
better battery since before the days of Thomas Edison (who was a major
battery tinkerer himself). (Disclosure: Fletcher and I share the same
literary agent.) If we had batteries that matched the price and
performance of fossil fuels, we would not only have cleaner cars, but
we might be able to remake much of the rest of the nation's energy
infrastructure, too. Wind and solar power are generated intermittently--
sometimes the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine--and
batteries can moderate that volatility. Stores of batteries placed in
the electric grid could collect energy when the sun shines or when the
wind blows and then discharge it when we need it. Not to put too fine
a point on it, but you might say that the future of the world depends
on better batteries--a better battery would alter geopolitics, mitigate
the disasters of climate change, and spur a new economic boom.
But a better battery doesn't seem to be in the offing anytime soon. As
Fletcher explains, physics, politics, and the price of gasoline have
always conspired against the improvement of battery technology.
Fletcher's book is hopeful--he investigates a number of promising
technologies that might theoretically challenge the dominance of
fossil fuels. But many of them are a long way from fruition, and the
history of failure in the battery industry doesn't inspire confidence.
We might get a better battery someday, and if we do it will probably
come from China, which has become the hub of advanced energy
production. But don't hold your breath.
The fundamental problem with batteries is the existence of gasoline.
Oil is cheap, abundant, and relatively easy to transport. Most
importantly, it has a high "energy density"--meaning that it's
phenomenally good at storing energy for its weight. Today's best
lithium-ion batteries can hold about 200 watt-hours per kilogram--a
measure of energy density--and they might theoretically be able to
store about 400 watt-hours per kilogram. Gasoline has a density
equivalent of around 13,000 watt-hours per kilogram.
The only reason electric cars might one day compete with cars that
rely on internal combustion is that gasoline engines are highly
inefficient; nearly all of the energy stored in gasoline is lost to
heat. But gasoline makes up for that flaw with another advantage: When
your car's out of gas, you can refill it in a few minutes. With
today's electrical infrastructure, batteries need many hours to
recharge. There's some hope that we might one day install fast-
charging stations across the country, but the researchers Fletcher
interviews point out that this is a daunting challenge. The battery in
today's Tesla roadster needs about four hours to charge. If you wanted
to charge that battery in 15 minutes, you'd need a 200-kilowatt
electric substation feeding the charging station. "Your house takes 1
kilowatt," one expert tells Fletcher. "If you want to have something
like a gasoline fuel station that is all electrical, you're talking
about multimegawatts of power at that station. And I just don't see
that happening."
Neither do I. So what's the answer?
Fletcher's book ends with a look at the most far-out research in the
battery world--the lithium-air battery. In this design, lithium and
carbon combine with oxygen from the air to form a system with a
staggering potential to store energy. In theory, the lithium-air
battery could store 11,000 watt-hours per kilogram, which makes it,
Fletcher says, "the best chance battery scientists have to beat
gasoline." A lithium-air battery could allow a car to drive 500 miles
before recharging. With that range, you wouldn't need a nationwide
system of quick-charging stations. You could drive pretty much
wherever you wanted all day, and then recharge your car at night.
But lithium-air is the cold fusion of the battery world--a would-be
game-changer that has the unfortunate downside of being impossible to
achieve (probably). Researchers have been working at lithium-air for
decades, but there are a number of challenges to overcome before such
a battery might be commercially viable. For one thing, the system uses
lithium metal, which is highly, explosively reactive with water. (In a
lithium-ion battery, lithium is combined with another element in the
cathode, and it is also present as a salt that's dissolved in a
solution.)* Water, of course, is present in the air, so the very idea
of a battery that mixes lithium metal with air has always seemed
little more than a fantasy. Fletcher reports that the fantasy has
become slightly more real lately. A company called PolyPlus has
developed a way to coat lithium metal to protect it from moisture, and
IBM has launched a research project aimed at building a lithium-air
battery.
But with every advance, there's another hurdle. PolyPlus's innovation
makes the lithium metal in a lithium-air battery easy to recharge, but
nobody knows, yet, how to recharge such a battery. Figuring that out
seems destined to take many more years. The chief technology officer
of PolyPlus tells Fletcher that it will be "a long time before you see
battery packs that are large enough and proven and tested enough that
you would start thinking about transportation."
That's the paradox of battery research. Advanced batteries could well
solve many of the problems that dog us today. But they'll only come
about many, many years from now--and by then, it could be too late.
[Farhad Manjoo is Slate's technology columnist and the author of True
Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society. You can e-mail him at
farhad.manjoo@slate.com]
--------------------
[Correction, June 22, 2011: This article originally included an
incorrect description of the components of lithium-ion batteries. The
batteries include lithium both in the cathode and as part of a salt
solution. Return to the corrected sentence.]
http://www.slate.com/id/2297125/pagenum/all/#p2
== 2 of 2 ==
Date: Sun, Jun 26 2011 11:01 am
From: "Felix Reynaldo"
"Clarence Thomas" <jismquiff@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:cfdea01a-9382-4b82-8b76-7eccb82e5e7f@x10g2000vbl.googlegroups.com...
"In the early 1970s, the first lithium-based battery that worked at
room temperature had the potential to upend the entire energy
business. [But] That didn't happen. Soon came a recession, an oil
glut, and the election of Ronald Reagan, which ended a great deal of
government funding for research into advanced energy projects."
---------------------------------
"Better Batteries Will Save the World"
=========================
Nice article but somewhat unbalanced. The culprit is not the economy or the
price of crude. The villain has been, until recently, an unholy cabal of
refiners and General Motors. These are the guys that destroyed electric
powered transportation on the west coast and were found guility of
conspiracy only to have the Nixon Administration merely give them a slap on
the wrist as punishment.
The real issue is that there has been too much money sabotaging battery
research. It was not always like that. Brookyn had battery powered
streetcars as early as 1910 and then a combination of Rockefeller and GM
interests put battery research to sleep.
Don't get me wrong. ICEs (internal combustion engines) have a great
advantage in that a cubic foot of gasoline contains more potential engery
than a cubic foot of batteries, but that is an issue of nature vs.
technology.
But things are turning around because it has been estimated that half of the
world's petroleum has already been used. Since lithium appears to be a
critical element in the future battery development, you should consider a
speculative (to be sure) lithium investment for your portfolio. I own stock
in a lithium mine in Australia that is traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange
It's Talison Lithium (Yahoo Finance symbol TLH.TO). Talison is a profitable,
ongoing business with an active customer book. Take a look at it.
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