"When I sat in front of a 9 inch black & white TV in the mid 1960’s watching Raymond Baxter on Tomorrow’s World the future was never going to be about batteries.
By Robert Llewellyn on April 6, 2011 3:53 PM
It was about white boxes with flashing lights that did the ironing, hydrogen fuel cells and flying cars.
The chunky Ever-Ready battery powered pea bulbs in my model theatre and sat in my bulky bicycle lights. They were big heavy things that didn’t last long and when they were dead you just threw them away.
However, when I was busy pogoing to the Sex Pistols and worrying about my masculinity in the mid 1970’s, Professor John Goodenough was busy at the Inorganic Research Group at Oxford University as he and his team developed the first rechargeable lithium ion battery.
Those of us old enough to remember early mobile phones and laptops will know that this battery technology has moved on considerably. Batteries have done three very important things: they last longer, charge faster, and are much smaller than they used to be.
So why can’t cars travel 500 miles on one charge and re-charge in 30 seconds? What’s taking the lazy boffins so long? Why can’t they just sort it out?
Lithium ion batteries have only been bulked up and used in cars for a very few years, and in very small numbers. Even in that time the technology has moved on incredibly.
What Nissan have done with the LEAF batteries is a massive step change. For a start, instead of cramming a pre-existing battery designed for a phone into the space left by the fuel tank or internal combustion engine of a pre-existing car, they’ve built the new car around the new batteries.
They are developing a battery refurbishment program that means after 100,000 miles they will rebuild your existing battery at a fraction of the cost of a new one.
Not only that, but in the time it takes you to drive 100,000 miles, the battery technology will have improved beyond measure. Your refurbished battery will weigh the same but take you considerably further on a charge and also re-charge much faster.
Is this me pontificating wildly, living in an EV fantasy bubble, ignoring cold hard facts?
I think not. Researchers at the University of Illinois led by Professor Paul Braun have recently been testing a battery that uses an ultra fine silica mesh that holds the battery materials, in this case nickel-metal hydride. In a small battery that would power a mobile phone, it can take a 70% charge in 1 second and a 90% charge in about 30.
Scale that up to a car-sized battery and you are looking at a few minutes for a full re-charge. This is technology using existing (and recyclable) materials, and the commercial pressure on materials science specialists is now enormous; they are all frantically investigating new battery technology.
It’s a massive emerging market and we can expect to see enormous changes very soon. Lithium air is a much-touted new battery technology presently being developed at MIT in America and Imperial College in London. This has the potential for 10 times the energy storage of current lithium ion batteries, so a car that can presently do 100 miles could potentially do 1,000 with a battery the same weight and size.
Then there’s a man who’s been building electric cars for a while, Mr Elon (Tesla) Musk, who thinks we’ll soon swap batteries for ultra capacitors. A man who actually builds battery electric cars is saying batteries are already old school.
I’ve heard a lot about ultra capacitors over the last few years, I filed them under ‘really good idea one day maybe’ along with hydrogen fuel cells and jet powered trousers. However, I now sense that some serious progress has been made in this area.
Nearly all the electronics we use today contain capacitors – tiny little dot-sized components that store or smooth the output of a power source in a device.
Super or Ultra capacitors do much the same thing only storing and releasing vastly greater amounts of electricity. An ultra capacitor can take a massive charge in an instant. It also releases it in an instant, and so the work presently being done in this area is to reduce the amount released to a steady stream as opposed to a massive jolt.
SO, ARE THE CURRENT GENERATION BATTERIES GOOD ENOUGH?
This is all important stuff, it’s all most people talk about who haven’t driven an electric car for any length of time.
Those few of us lucky to have done so experience a remarkable lack of ‘range anxiety.’
Covering over 9,000 miles in an electric car gives you a lot more confidence in the technology. I never ‘ran out,’ not once. I had to keep an eye on my range, I had to plan my journeys a little, but truly, it wasn’t that bad.
How people can be so confident that a technology is ‘not for them’ when the nearest they’ve been to an electric car is the Nissan Leaf advert in a newspaper is a mystery.
The Mitsubishi i-MiEV I drove last year had an advertised range of 90 miles. In my experience this was nearer 70, but that didn’t stop me using it all the time.
There are now a plethora of smart phone apps you can use which record your daily mileage, a way of finding out exactly how far you do drive. Everyone I have spoken to who’s used these devices says the same thing; they don’t drive anything like as far as they thought they did. They soon realise that an electric car could easily accomplish 90% of their car journeys."
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