Thoughts on the BP oil-rig disaster

[Tapewolf]

Actually, I've heard of batteries from Toshiba under development that have a charge time of ~5 min.
http://www.ev.com/ev-guides/ev-miscellaneous/toshibas-breakthrough-ev-battery-charges-in-5-minutes.html

Wouldn't that require a stupendous amount of current?

EDIT:

I take that back, it looks like it will work from a domestic supply:
http://www.scib.jp/en/product/spec.htm

[Tezkat]

Heh. That's a 48 Wh battery. One of those is enough to move a car... oh... a few hundred meters.

A Tesla Roadster, to use the example cited above, stores about 53 kWh on a full charge. Charging efficiency is around 86%. The average American household uses about 29 kWh of electricity per day. In other words, two days worth of electrical power for a typical household go into a single "tank". If you want to fully charge that thing in a few minutes, you're looking at something on the order of a megawatt of power draw.

That's a lot of power.

(For reference, most nuclear reactors produce less than 1000 MWe. Conventional plants only produce a few hundred. Charging enough cars simultaneously will quickly saturate production capacity.)

Even slower overnight charging has the potential to blow transformers left and right if people adopt electric cars faster than utility companies upgrade electrical grids. For that matter, given the massive costs of the power consumed charging electric cars, we'd need a much smarter grid. Even if the cars have adapters to charge from a standard plug... who pays to charge a car from an outlet at work? At a motel? In a parking garage?

We don't have the infrastructure to support a wide scale transition to electrical vehicles... yet.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Heh. That's a 48 Wh battery. One of those is enough to move a car... oh... a few hundred meters.

Heh. Given it's Toshiba, I suspect they're looking more at laptop use. And a laptop has, what, 4.8Wh battery? Having a laptop that you can use for two days, and plug it in for 5 minutes? I'd pay for one of those.


.. 'course, probably weighs a ton, but you get that. ;-]

[Turnsky]

Heh. That's a 48 Wh battery. One of those is enough to move a car... oh... a few hundred meters.

Heh. Given it's Toshiba, I suspect they're looking more at laptop use. And a laptop has, what, 4.8Wh battery? Having a laptop that you can use for two days, and plug it in for 5 minutes? I'd pay for one of those.


.. 'course, probably weighs a ton, but you get that. ;-]

so back to the days of laptop's past, then?. 

[Tapewolf]

Heh. That's a 48 Wh battery. One of those is enough to move a car... oh... a few hundred meters.

Quite right, I evidently missed a couple of digits.  Realistically you'd probably have a bank of these, but then you'd be back to square one with the time or energy requirements.

[Cvstos]

Heh. That's a 48 Wh battery. One of those is enough to move a car... oh... a few hundred meters.

A Tesla Roadster, to use the example cited above, stores about 53 kWh on a full charge. Charging efficiency is around 86%. The average American household uses about 29 kWh of electricity per day. In other words, two days worth of electrical power for a typical household go into a single "tank". If you want to fully charge that thing in a few minutes, you're looking at something on the order of a megawatt of power draw.

That's a lot of power.

(For reference, most nuclear reactors produce less than 1000 MWe. Conventional plants only produce a few hundred. Charging enough cars simultaneously will quickly saturate production capacity.)

Even slower overnight charging has the potential to blow transformers left and right if people adopt electric cars faster than utility companies upgrade electrical grids. For that matter, given the massive costs of the power consumed charging electric cars, we'd need a much smarter grid. Even if the cars have adapters to charge from a standard plug... who pays to charge a car from an outlet at work? At a motel? In a parking garage?

We don't have the infrastructure to support a wide scale transition to electrical vehicles... yet.

Where do you see the 48 Wh? I don't see it in my link. And Toshiba is definitely targeting these for EV use. http://www.electronista.com/articles/07/12/11/toshiba.scib.battery/

But they're also making them for other things, which tells me the tech can probably scale.

[Tezkat]

Where do you see the 48 Wh? I don't see it in my link. And Toshiba is definitely targeting these for EV use. http://www.electronista.com/articles/07/12/11/toshiba.scib.battery/

But they're also making them for other things, which tells me the tech can probably scale.

Your article describes Toshiba's SCiB technology, which has stats posted on their web site. A single cell is rated at slightly over 10 Wh. The 12V 5-pack weighs 1kg and has a nominal capacity of 48 Wh.

An individual cell can charge to full in 10 minutes or so. That will power something like a laptop all day. A car? That much juice will move it less than a city block. While you can,  in theory, charge an arbitrarily large bank of these cells in parallel, the power requirements quickly become ridiculous. And that's assuming that you could even accomplish it safely.

A 53 kWh Tesla Roadster with 86% charge efficiency needs 740 kW over 10 minutes to charge to full from empty. That's several orders of magnitude larger than residential systems can produce, so our hypothetical fast charging car would need specialized recharging facilities. Wander over to your local gas station. Count the cars going in and out. Electric "gas" stations designed to handle such a load would have power requirements comparable to a particle accelerator.

The barrier here isn't technology; it's physics. Maybe you can raise the efficiency of the charging mechanism or the motor or the wheels. Naturally, those are important, but they're nickles and dimes on this scale. Even at 100% efficiency, a purely electric vehicle with both range and refueling characteristics comparable to gasoline engines just isn't practical. Ultimately, technology can only take us so far. It's the expectations and behaviour of the users that must change to take us the rest of the way.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

A 53 kWh Tesla Roadster with 86% charge efficiency needs 740 kW over 10 minutes to charge to full from empty. That's several orders of magnitude larger than residential systems can produce, so our hypothetical fast charging car would need specialized recharging facilities. Wander over to your local gas station. Count the cars going in and out. Electric "gas" stations designed to handle such a load would have power requirements comparable to a particle accelerator.

Not wishing to rain on your parade, here, and definitely not disagreeing with your point...

... but how much of the power in a Tesla Roadster is required to haul the huge bank of batteries around? How much does 53 kWh of Tesla Roadster batteries weigh? How much does 53kWh of these new Toshiba batteries weigh?

I may well be barking up the wrong tree, here, but making the car weigh less is going to have a huge improvement in the efficiency... I just have no idea if that's enough to offset the other points you raise.


... and the mental image of a "gas" station that has a nuclear power station out back for itself amuses the heck out of me... ;-]

[Tapewolf]

... and the mental image of a "gas" station that has a nuclear power station out back for itself amuses the heck out of me... ;-]

Conveniently enough, Toshiba also make pebble-bed reactors...

[Drayco84]

I hate to say this guys, but electric cars have been done.

EDIT: Although, I'm seriously surprised that nobody's mentioned it yet...

[Reese Tora]

I hate to say this guys, but electric cars have been done.

EDIT: Although, I'm seriously surprised that nobody's mentioned it yet...

That's not really a good example, because it died due to market forces at the time, poor advertising, and limited capabilities due to available tech at the time of design. (no, I don't buy in to the claims that GM deliberately sank the project)

Now, there are more people receptive to the idea of electric cars and the tech is there for making it viable for a daily commute.  And advertising can always be done better, of course.

[Kenji]

I hate to say this guys, but electric cars have been done.

EDIT: Although, I'm seriously surprised that nobody's mentioned it yet...

That's not really a good example, because it died due to market forces at the time, poor advertising, and limited capabilities due to available tech at the time of design. (no, I don't buy in to the claims that GM deliberately sank the project)

Now, there are more people receptive to the idea of electric cars and the tech is there for making it viable for a daily commute.  And advertising can always be done better, of course.

Of course, they have to figure out how to make an electric car that doesn't get refueled by plugging it into a wall outlet that gets its electricity power from burning highly toxic coal as opposed to an engine that burns less toxic oil....

[Keleth]

We just need more nuclear and fushion reactors :o

Or those Vertical magnetic windmills. Mass produce those suckas.

[Turnsky]

We just need more nuclear and fushion reactors :o

Or those Vertical magnetic windmills. Mass produce those suckas.

[Tezkat]

Not wishing to rain on your parade, here, and definitely not disagreeing with your point...

... but how much of the power in a Tesla Roadster is required to haul the huge bank of batteries around? How much does 53 kWh of Tesla Roadster batteries weigh? How much does 53kWh of these new Toshiba batteries weigh?

I may well be barking up the wrong tree, here, but making the car weigh less is going to have a huge improvement in the efficiency... I just have no idea if that's enough to offset the other points you raise.

The Roadster has a curb weight of 1235 kg. 450kg of that is batteries. To  achieve 53 kWh with off the shelf Toshiba SCiB cells you'd need a bank of about 5300 of them--weighing in at just under 800 kg. Even if you could make batteries with significantly higher capacity per weight--and I don't doubt that that's possible--you're still going to have trouble achieving both range and refueling time parity with gasoline vehicles. A kWh is still a kWh no matter how much it weighs in battery form.

Frankly, I question how much of a market there would be for fast charging stations. With a slightly smarter grid, you could reasonably plug in a car any place you park. The Roadster already has a range of about 350 km. How many people really need to drive more than that in one sitting? And would they still be doing it even in gas vehicles once oil prices return to double their current values... or more?

I hate to say this guys, but electric cars have been done.

EDIT: Although, I'm seriously surprised that nobody's mentioned it yet...

That's not really a good example, because it died due to market forces at the time, poor advertising, and limited capabilities due to available tech at the time of design. (no, I don't buy in to the claims that GM deliberately sank the project)

Now, there are more people receptive to the idea of electric cars and the tech is there for making it viable for a daily commute.  And advertising can always be done better, of course.

Oh, electric vehicles still face a lot of challenges...

For instance, the ZENN was a kinda neat city car--an example of the direction electric vehicles might be going in the future. Rather than try to create a plug in replacement for gasoline vehicles, they distilled city driving down to the essentials: 40 kph, range upwards of 80km, and dirt cheap to build and operate (MSRP as low as $12k). It used inexpensive 6.2 kWh lead-acid batteries and could be quick charged in 5 minutes with specialized equipment. (A standard 110 V plug would fully charge it in 4 hours.)

So they had this cool little car that a lot of people wanted to buy... but they couldn't sell it in Canada (where they were manufactured) because the government refused to approve it despite the fact that it met all appropriate safety regulations. After years of stalling, certification magically appeared within weeks of a CBC National report about it. And even then, provincial regulations are such that you still can't drive it on most Canadian roads.

The last ZENN car rolled off the production line a few months ago. Even in this day and age, people are willing and able to kill the electric car.

[Drayco84]

Frankly, I question how much of a market there would be for fast charging stations. With a slightly smarter grid, you could reasonably plug in a car any place you park. The Roadster already has a range of about 350 km. How many people really need to drive more than that in one sitting? And would they still be doing it even in gas vehicles once oil prices return to double their current values... or more?

To be honest, it depends on how far their commute to work or school is. In places that are more compact, such as most European countries, you'd be able to get a lot more use out of them. Heck, even in the States a lot of people could use at least one of these things. (Seeing as how most families in the states have two or more cars anyway...)

Oh, electric vehicles still face a lot of challenges...

For instance, the ZENN was a kinda neat city car--an example of the direction electric vehicles might be going in the future. Rather than try to create a plug in replacement for gasoline vehicles, they distilled city driving down to the essentials: 40 kph, range upwards of 80km, and dirt cheap to build and operate (MSRP as low as $12k). It used inexpensive 6.2 kWh lead-acid batteries and could be quick charged in 5 minutes with specialized equipment. (A standard 110 V plug would fully charge it in 4 hours.)

So they had this cool little car that a lot of people wanted to buy... but they couldn't sell it in Canada (where they were manufactured) because the government refused to approve it despite the fact that it met all appropriate safety regulations. After years of stalling, certification magically appeared within weeks of a CBC National report about it. And even then, provincial regulations are such that you still can't drive it on most Canadian roads.

The last ZENN car rolled off the production line a few months ago. Even in this day and age, people are willing and able to kill the electric car.

Wow... Just... Wow... I've come to expect that kind of BS from the US government, (Where I live, BTW.) but that... Just... Wow...

Anyway, one last link I've heard about and then I'm done.

[Reese Tora]

Frankly, I question how much of a market there would be for fast charging stations. With a slightly smarter grid, you could reasonably plug in a car any place you park. The Roadster already has a range of about 350 km. How many people really need to drive more than that in one sitting? And would they still be doing it even in gas vehicles once oil prices return to double their current values... or more?

Lots of people.  Transportation of goods aside (everything from big rigs to delivery trucks), you have people who regularly commute between two locations(say, LA and Sacremento) on a weekly or monthly basis, professionals such as technicians and other professionals...

My company is in the business of testing cell networks.  Our technicians can spend up to 8 hours at a time driving around in market.  They don't have the luxury of stopping to charge in the middle of the job because we often have tight time tables for our work. (for instance, driving a base line before modifications are made and testing afterwards has to fit inside of maintenance windows).  we need to keep our guys up and running, some times in remote areas.

A friend of mine is an inspector for a construction company.  He often has to drive long distances across his state to get to a job site, and is expected to be on time for things like concrete pours.

In addition, anyone who is driving cross country for, say, a vacation would want this capacity, as you might end up needing to refuel three or four times a day in an 8 hour drive.

No, the average commuter doesn't travel more than 30 miles a day, but when you're talking about radical shifts in the country's infrastructure you need to take in to account everything, not just what you see.

[Vidar]

Yeah, electric cars are cool technology and all, but they're not quite ready to completely replace the fossile fuel variety just yet.

New technologies are being devised to make them more usable, such as coils in the road that recharge the car while it's driving through the magic of induction, and cars where you simply replace an empty battery for a full one each time it's depleted, but overall it's not yet practial.

I can see how small electric vehicles can be very usefull inside city limits and other small errands, though.
Just create a small, light-weight 1 or 2 person car with solar cells on its roof for cheaper recharging, and use it to do your groceries. Just don't try to use it on the freeway.

[Turnsky]

Yeah, electric cars are cool technology and all, but they're not quite ready to completely replace the fossile fuel variety just yet.

New technologies are being devised to make them more usable, such as coils in the road that recharge the car while it's driving through the magic of induction, and cars where you simply replace an empty battery for a full one each time it's depleted, but overall it's not yet practial.

I can see how small electric vehicles can be very usefull inside city limits and other small errands, though.
Just create a small, light-weight 1 or 2 person car with solar cells on its roof for cheaper recharging, and use it to do your groceries. Just don't try to use it on the freeway.

really Toyota's got the right idea for the moment with the Hybrids, (Prius and now the new Hybrid variant of the Camry). that'll help improve batteries and the other electrical systems for a full electric vehicle to be a viable option later on down the road.
It's not off petroleum just yet, but it's a step in the right direction.

[Alondro]

I'm finding out more and more how government red-tape is getting in the way of taking care of the oil spill.

Within the first few days, several nations (such as the Netherlands) offered a number of skimmers to help sweep up the oil, but were turned down.  Others offered ships to help transport equipment, and were turned down.  State governments have been bogged down and openly stymied by federal response. 

There is a law preventing international ships from moving between US ports (the 'Jones Act' section 57 of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920) which is getting in the way of the international response.  HOWEVER, this law can be suspended in times of emergency.  It was quickly suspended after Katrina to aid in supplementing oil and gas supplies, within a few days, which shows it can be done and help can be allowed to arrive quickly.  But to this day, the act has not been suspended for this disaster! 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920

And note, the previous suspensions have all involved oil and gas, thus clear precedent exists for the act to be suspended in this case as it directly pertains to oil and gas production.  Why has it not been done?

Clearly, this entire administration has no idea what to do.

[Alondro]

A new update.

Seafloor seep

It looks like once the relief wells are put in place, they'll have to be used to completely drain the oil formation.  If the seafloor has cracked to this extent, the only way to make sure oil doesn't gush from the underground reserve ever again is to totally empty it.