Depending on your point of view, the journey of EE Times/EE Life editorial director Brian Fuller across America in a Chevy Volt was either a great adventure or the cushy assignment of the year. In my view, it represented EE Times’ most significant investment thus far -- thanks to the sponsorship of Avnet -- in perhaps the most important technology of the 21st century: electric power storage, specifically in the form of long-life batteries.
Fuller and his videographer brother Kirk, driving coast-to-coast in an electric car with internal-combustion backup, was something of a leap of faith. They faced swathes of America in which there exist no power stations to plug in their Volt and recharge the juice in the vehicle’s 288-cell, 16-kilowatt hour battery pack. Right now, 48 of 50 states, according to Car and Driver, have fewer than 10 such stations each. This left Brian and Kirk using the Volt’s cute backup 83hp internal combustion engine a lot more than they might have preferred. Indeed, after the switch from battery (range 35 miles) to gasoline power (an additional 300-odd miles), the Volt averages around 30 miles per gallon. This isn’t bad, but, compared to, say, a 1972 Honda Civic, it’s embarrassing.
When I heard about Brian’s “Drive for Innovation” experiment, I found myself focusing not on the current Chevy Volt’s limitations, but on the surprising speed of its development. When I first read about Volt prototypes less than two years ago, I understood that an operating, affordable consumer Volt was still far, far away. It wouldn’t hit the market, in any substantial volume, within the decade.
That prediction was over cautious. Today, there are enough Volts on the road -- along with competitors like Nissan’s Leaf, various hybrids, and an electric Ford Focus due out in limited production next year -- that it might be safe to suggest that the electric car is here to stay.
Advancing the cause is the federal government’s commitment to R&D in power storage technology, batteries in particular. It started with a $69-billion clean-energy package and the revival of General Motors (creator of the Volt). There’s a $7,500 tax credit to purchasers of electric cars, and the Obama administration has invested in battery development throughout America’s 20 National Laboratories. In the current issue of Washington Monthly, Eric D. Isaacs, director of the Argonne National Lab., notes that his team pioneered the technology in the 2011 Volt battery, which was licensed for manufacture by Korean chemical giant LG Chem.
Perhaps the most encouraging facet of the Volt and its overly large, short-range, too-expensive ($10,000) lithium-ion battery pack is Isaacs’ lament that researchers have until now failed miserably in producing an air-cathode battery. If this technology could be conquered, it would multiply tenfold the storage capacity of long-life batteries -- from the Volt’s 35-mile range to 350 miles.
Hydrogen storage has some interesting possibilities: some metal/ceramic compounds can be saturated with hydrogen at densities larger than liquid hydrogen--very counterintuitive, but true. They are inherently safe, too---the extraction rate is slow enough so that there is no 'gigantic fireball' if the tank is compromised.
Also, metal hydride storage has not advanced appreciably to extract the tied up hydrogen quickly enough for it to be viable for most applications.
Also, hydrogen is typically gotten by steam methane reformation (SMR) which use hydrocarbon as the feedstock (lot's of CO2). Unless we are diasociating water via electrolysis to get H2 and using renewable energy inputs to do it, we are merely squeezing the closed system part of the balloon on our planet.
We've got far too many technically challenged but heavy on the tree hugging ignorance amongst us, a lot of them gullible and shallow politicians.
I once told a disagreeing poster to do the material and energy balance to prove a point about an energy process and he accused me of muddying up the discussion. Absolutely amazing...
Let's keep in mind the other big issue with hydrogen that seems often forgotten in the media hype: it's not an energy source, it's an energy storage material. There aren't any hydrogen mines. Hydrogen is not a primary source of energy. We still need to mine uranium, coal, etc. or build solar collectors or hydroelectric dams to come up with the energy needed to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, which is later burned in the car engine (or used in the fuel cell) to release that stored energy, at less than 100% efficiency. Then we must use more energy to compress the hydrogen into tanks, much of which is lost as waste heat. Look at an air compressor in the hardware store; there's a reason they have fans blowing air over cooling fins! Hopefully some of that loss will be recoverable.
I don't get it. I could have done this 11 years ago with my Honda Insight. Anyone who owns a Prius can do this.
Remember, in spite of the blindness of the press and the successful marketing snowjob from GM, a Volt is just a hybrid. It has the same limitations as a hybrid (uses gasoline, has a complex power train) and the same benefits (doesn't depend on finding places to plug in).
If someone did a cross-country drive in a Leaf or a Tesla, THAT would be news. Doing it in a Volt doesn't prove anything other than that GM has better marketing people than DN has journalists.
It's clear to me that we need to apply the engineering and scientific talent we already have to come up with a "SuperBattery" regardless of the preceived current efficiency of the total system.
After we solve the basic problem of a light weight energy storage device then we can address the primary source of power........maybe it has to be Nuclear ! maybe solar...We can figure that out later...
The main impediment to getting rid of the internal combustion engine and the importation of oil ......is the lack of an Energy Storage Device
We must have a "SuperBattery"
and we must work on it's development and manufacture Now !!!
From an Energy Storage argument, it appears we should be shoveling funds into a "hydrogen economy", if we wish to maximize energy storage efficiency."
The problem with that hydrogen tank is that hydrogen is so light weight that the tank needs to be either very large or kept at enormous pressure (700 atmospheres is a figure that comes to mind). In either case, that tank ends up being a pretty large and heavy metal structure. Once you adjust the numbers to include the weight of the tank along with the wieight of the fuel, the numbers look quite different.
I had to chuckle once again at the comparison of the Volt's highway mileage during a cross-country trek to that of an old Honda. Really, who cares about highway mileage these days? Population density is highest at each end of the country and that's where the jobs are. For the average working stiff who lives on either coast, citymileage is of utmost importance and that's where hybrids and electric vehicles embarass cars of old. Let's see an old Honda Civic get 50 MPG in high-traffic conditions!
The other thing that bothers me is any comparison of diesel vehicles to hybrids without mention of the large fuel cost differences between diesel and regular gas. It can be as high as $.50/gallon here in CA.
The history of engineering shows that the longer people have been trying unsuccessfully to solve a given problem, the less likely it is that a solution exists. "Breakthroughs" tend to come when the field of investigation is still fresh. When the concept of electric batteries was first discovered, they were obviously extremely useful and so lots of effort went into experimenting will all sorts of chemical combinations and mechanical structures. Most of the basic chemistries used today are a century old, with improvements only in manufacturing processes. Some of the "obsolete" technologies were elegant in their simplicity, such as the "crow's foot" battery used for railway signaling. It consisted of two simple chemical solutions, one foating on top of the other, with a simple heavy cast electrode in the bottom. Its great advantage was that it could provide a small amount of current for a very long time (sound familiar?). If it wasn't for the fact taht it would spill if tipped over, it would be great for today's micropower sensors and telemetry devices.
Even the "new" lithium batteries are really only "new" in the sense of metalic lithium becoming widely available, and new manufacturing processes that can harness lithium's energetic reactions in a way that keeps the battery from self-discharging or catching fire and yet still provides electricity when needed.
Virtually every article in the popular press about battery "breakthroughs" ends up being about either supercapacitors, incremental manufacturing improvements, or theoretical research that is far from producing any sort of product. The articles typically then go on to repeat the standard points about all the great things we could do if we had better batteries, and when the government should fund more research. What is missing is any reporting on an actual functional, manufacturable battery that is truly a breakthrough in terms of energy density (one order of magnitude improvement would be a nice start) over anything currently available. Currently, in terms of how far it can propel a vehicle, the Chevy Volt's complicated and expensive battery pack is equivalent to about one gallon of gasoline.
Like nuclear fusion, battery "breakthroughs" seem destined to always be the energy source of the future. The public has been led (mostly by writers) to believe that the way to get useful new inventions is for the government to throw money at the problem. "It worked with nuclear fusion. so it should work with everything else" is the fallacious argument. If you can turn desired technologies into practical products just by having the government throw money at them, why waste time on batteries? Why not have the government fund the invention of anti-gravity machines and Star Trek "transporters"?
Free market, schmee market. As has been demonstrated countless times, the "free market" is good at one thing: allocation of scarce resources IN THE SHORT TERM. For long-term projects requiring bold vision and unusual risk-taking, forget it.
We would have no microchip industry today if we had simply left it all up to the free market. The Defense Department's willingness to pay "above market" prices to get the benefits of miniaturized digital circuits got the whole ball rolling.
IMO, the government should be shoveling money at any technology that offers a reasonable hope of improving our energy prospects, in the full expectation that many of them won't ultimately prove out. Call it "waste" if you want, but we often learn more from our failures than from our successes. And this is the kind of long-term, multi-pronged, high-risk effort that the so-called free market just can't address.
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