Can you feel the electricity? There's a growing consensus that the next generation of automobiles will, to one degree or another, be powered by batteries. The most likely scenario is that a fling with plug-in hybrids will lead to a serious romance and eventually marriage to pure battery electrics. Yes, to make this sustainable we'll have to shift some of our electric grid from its current 50 percent dependence on coal power, but that is an achievable goal.
It may be that the batteries themselves will be harder. The marketplace has arrived at a consensus that the lithium-ion (li-ion) battery is the only real choice for the coming electric cars. But li-ion is also kind of problematic. Sony commercialized lightweight lithium-ion batteries for electronics in 1991; since then, most of us use them every day in laptops, mobile phones and other devices.
The Th!nk City: a 110-mile range.
The great advantage of li-ion (aside from the fact that it's relatively non-toxic) is that it has twice the energy density of, say, nickel-cadmium batteries. But what works great in your relatively coddled cellphone is a challenge in the automotive environment, where the batteries will have to withstand extremes of temperatures and go through really fast charging cycles. Li-ion has also had stability issues -- remember those Sony laptop fires? Well, that company just recalled 100,000 more laptop li-ions because of fire hazards.
I hear that some of the most interesting approaches to li-ion car batteries increase energy storage using the controversial engineering of tiny materials known as nanotechnology.
The li-ion contenders are mostly small companies contracting with automakers. Johnson Controls/Saft has worked on batteries for the Saturn Vue plug-in hybrid. A123 had been a frontrunner to deliver batteries for the forthcoming Chevrolet Volt plug-in, but it now appears that the contract is going to the South Korea-based LG Chem.
A bit of a wild card is Ener1, whose subsidiary EnerDel builds li-ions in a factory in Indiana using technology developed at the Argonne National Labs. "The company's new, highly reliable and safe batteries are designed to be lighter in weight, occupy less space, provide more power, more energy, and have a longer life than the nickel-metal-hydride batteries found in today's hybrid vehicles," Ener1 says. But it would say that, wouldn't it?
Since Korean technology is key here, Ener1 just bought a controlling interest in one of that country's biggest li-ion producers, Enertech International. In announcing the deal, CEO Charles Gassenheimer says he sees a potential market for automotive li-ion batteries at $20 to 30 billion, dwarfing the $7 billion spent annually on consumer electronics.
reddit
digg
Del.icio.us
facebook
newsvine
stumble
What is share?
rss
