"By all rights, this would make internal combustion engines unnecessary.''

Texas Startup Says It Has Batteries Beat


By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: September 4, 2007
Filed at 9:20 a.m. ET

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- Millions of inventions pass quietly through the U.S. patent office each year. Patent No. 7,033,406 did, too, until energy insiders spotted six words in the filing that sounded like a death knell for the internal combustion engine.

An Austin-based startup called EEStor promised ''technologies for replacement of electrochemical batteries,'' meaning a motorist could plug in a car for five minutes and drive 500 miles roundtrip between Dallas and Houston without gasoline.

By contrast, some plug-in hybrids on the horizon would require motorists to charge their cars in a wall outlet overnight and promise only 50 miles of gasoline-free commute. And the popular hybrids on the road today still depend heavily on fossil fuels.

''It's a paradigm shift,'' said Ian Clifford, chief executive of Toronto-based ZENN Motor Co., which has licensed EEStor's invention. ''The Achilles' heel to the electric car industry has been energy storage. By all rights, this would make internal combustion engines unnecessary.''


more:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-No-More-Batteries.html

I'm afraid that the petroleum industry will buy the patent and bury it.

n/t

Unfortunately, historically, the enthusiasm of the inventor and the physics of reality don't match well.
We already know that, if the problems with energy storage could be solved, even partially, there would be no question of the boon it would represent to humanity in transportation terms.

The most efficient form of energy storage is matter. Turning matter into energy or energy into matter is something we are just not very good at, right now.

What we are going to have to do, at least until we learn to safely unlock the matter to energy to matter challenges, is to convert sunlight to more readily usable forms of energy and use them sparingly.

Every form of energy we currently use, with the possible exception of fission and fusion, is a conversion and/or concentration of solar energy.
The energy from fossil fuels is concentrated sunshine, as is hydro power, wind power and wave power. When we learn to use the power from inside the earth, the question is not yet resolved, but we'll get to it.

(Just FYI...)

> Every form of energy we currently use, with the possible
> exception of fission and fusion, is a conversion and/or
> concentration of solar energy.

(Assuming our physics is correct,) there's exactly
one form of "original" energy in the universe: nuclear
fusion. Everything except fusion is "stored solar
energy".

Even fission is stored stellar energy. Not from our
sun, of course, but from some other primordial sun
whose death created the fissionable heavy elements
the we use as fuel.

Tesha

the argument out of the post for brevity and to entice into further discussion.

Fusion is, of course, the source of sunlight and the source of the material later used for fission. Thanks for making it interesting.

> I fully agree with you...

(I understood that -- sorry I didn't make it more clear!)

Tesha

Okay, the miracle product is an improved ultracapacitor.
Nothing revolutionary, but let's assume it actually meets
its claims (of storing enough energy in a small enough
volume to finally be practical as a replacement for the
chemical batteries in electric cars).

(Important note: Ultracapacitors are already used today
in hybrid vehicles as adjuncts to the chemical batteries.)

Let's say a car needs 10 HP to run at highway speeds
with the radio and air-conditioner blasting. (That's
probably a bit optimistic, but it's a useful starting
point.) That's 7.4 kilowatts (KW) of electric power.
Let's say the car goes 300 miles at 60 MPH. That's 5
hours of driving. So we used 37 kilowatt-hours (KWH)
of electricity.

Now we want to recharge the car in the same 5 minutes
or so that it takes to fill your gas tank with stored
chemical energy in the form of gasoline. Let's assume
that the input-output process is 90% efficient so we'll
need to put 41 KWH of electricity back into the system
to eventually get back those 37 that we'll eventually
consume. To put 41 KWH into the ultracapacitor in 5
minutes, we'll need to run at a power level of 820
kilowatts.

Pick a charging voltage: 300 is a convenient and typical
voltage used for modern high-power electronics. To
achieve 820 KW, we'll need to run 2,733 Amps through
our power connector. That's a mighty big plug! Even
if we design a connector that safely moves 1000 volts,
we'll still need 820 Amps, still too big for a practical
plug that lives through tens of thousands of mate/unmate
cycles, works in the heat and the snow and rain, and
survives use by fools.

Furthermore, if we assume that half the energy losses
occur during charging and half occur during discharging,
we'll need to throw away heat that's arising at the
rate of 41 kilowatts! That's 27 toasters all operating
simultaneously under the hood of our electric vehicle.
There must be a might big fan spinning under our hood,
or maybe we're using cooling water supplied by the
filling station.

Furthermore, we're not the only car recharging at
the Kwik-E-Charge; there are five other "pumps" in
use, so the "filling station" is drawing a total of
almost 5 million watts of electricity (or about
6700 horsepower, more power than the most powerful
railroad locomotives). Where's *THAT* power coming
from? And we're drawing this huge power load during
the day, 'same as so many other "peak" loads!*

I think we can safely conclude that even if this
new ultracapacitor works, five minute charging
won't work. Overnight charging (or charging while
you work) will continue to be the dominant paradigm
for electric vehicles and some sort of liquid
chemical fuel or whole-battery-swaps remain the
only practical alternative for the Kwik-E-Charge
stores.

Tesha


* For you electrical engineers out there, that
represents about 50 amps of load on a 33,000
volt three-phase distribution circuit; not an
insurmountable load, but quite a bit more than
the power company is used to delivering to a
"filling station".

Transportation and our highway system has been a great engine of economic growth. I am trying to figure out how we are going to continue that advantage of access to markets when we are limited to "one charge trips". We could do "commuting" on overnight charging. What about the traveling/outside sales people? What about the US Postal service?

Have I mentioned that this kind of techno-euphoria drives me absolutely round-the-bend crazy?

Does nobody get the fact that maintaining Business As Usual in transportation (or industrial agricultural production or any other form of resource throughput) merely enables the continuing growth that is the underlying malignancy of our civilization? That at best it merely squeezes the oversized balloon of human activity into a different shape rather than making it any smaller? That it increases the pressure on all the other species we are destroying to make room for ourselves? That in this particular manifestation it merely frees up oil for others to use to expand their planet-destroying activities? That increasing human energy use in any form is part of the problem rather than part of the solution?

Are we so mesmerized by our own cleverness that we have blinded ourselves to the real shape of the world we have created?

Hello, is anybody out there?

as an indication of whether they've put up, or should just STFU.