Charged With Battery

By | April 5, 2005
3 Comments

Toshiba has developed a fast-charging lithium ion battery that can charge to 80% capacity within a minute. Hat tip to Kjell Hagen of Norway who suggests that this technology might make electric vehicles practical.

The batteries that Toshiba is working with are meant for smaller items like portable electronics, but Kjell makes an important point. The problems with all-electric vehicles are:

  1. Range
  2. Expense of the batteries
  3. Frequency of replacing batteries
  4. Environmental impact of battery disposal
  5. Lack of infrastructure (gas stations are not presently recharging stations)
  6. and, Time required to recharge.

tzero.JPGPower and performance might once have been a consideration, but see here and here.

Most electric cars presently use either lead acid or nickel cadmium batteries because lithium ion batteries are 3 to 4 times more expensive. Lithium ion batteries already offer superior range to those traditional electric car batteries. If these batteries could also be refueled within several minutes, then they might be worth the expense.

Either way, I’m excited about the possibility of a one-minute recharge on my cell phone.

  • https://www.blog.speculist.com Phil Bowermaster

    The one-minute recharge sounds good, but the battery-powered car? I don’t know. My money is on fossil-fuel powered vehicles eventually getting their emissions down to the zero range.

  • https://www.blog.speculist.com Stephen Gordon

    Phil:

    I hold out hope for electric cars because they are not limited to power harvested under the hood of our cars from a single resource – gasoline.

    Gasoline has been hard to beat. The amount of energy it takes to pull it from the ground, refine it, and put it our gas tanks is remarkably low compared to the energy we get from exploding it in internal combustion engines.

    I hope someday we can do better. Imagine an electric car battery that doesn’t need to be replaced often, has a range comparable to a tank of gas, can be recharged quickly, holds its charge well, and that can be sold at a reasonable cost.

    If we had batteries like that we wouldn’t have to limit ourselves to the most efficient power that can be produced by explosions in a mobile engine. We could use power from any source. Hopefully this would give us greater latitude in coming up with cheap and environmentally-friendly power.

  • Engineer-Poet

    One-minute recharge potentially means one-minute drain time, or… 600 kW peak output from a 10 kWh battery.

    That’s about 800 horsepower.  Can you imagine something like the Prius with 800 horsepower, or even 200?

    Stephen speaks for me when he says that batteries (of whatever chemistry) are the way to get away from increasingly scarce and expensive petroleum.  Solar power has been close to the per-mile price of gasoline since last year, and people are already making grid-fed hybrid cars.  Do you think that speed freaks are going to ignore the performance possibilities of these ultra-low-resistance batteries?  The demand for plug-in hybrids is about to become too big for the automakers to ignore, and Toyota looks set to lead.