WoW
via Frank
The Innovation: A ceramic power source for electric cars that could blow away the combustion engine
The Disrupted: Oil companies and carmakers that don’t climb aboard
Forget hybrids and hydrogen-powered vehicles. EEStor, a stealth company in Cedar Park, Texas, is working on an “energy storage” device that could finally give the internal combustion engine a run for its money — and begin saving us from our oil addiction. “To call it a battery discredits it,” says Ian Clifford, the CEO of Toronto-based electric car company Feel Good Cars, which plans to incorporate EEStor’s technology in vehicles by 2008. (more…)
I hope it’s for real and not some kind of pre-IPO hype where the technology will turn out to be unworkable, too expensive or something else that will prevent it from happening. We’ve seen this too often to get too excited. They will also have to bring the cost down so that vehicles with it are affordable. Not just affordable over its lifetime due to the fuel savings, but affordable at time of purchase by significant numbers of people to make a difference in oil useage.
Of course this raises another problem – if significant number of people opt for new vehicles using this technology where is the electricity going to come from to power those vehicles and what is going to be used to generate it? The only real answer to that is unfortunately nuclear power reactors.
I suspect that the fast recharge on the capacitor is due to a high voltage (a measure of electrical potential, the force which pushes electricity through a wire) , high amperage (electron flow) current being applied to it. Actually to be more accurate here – the fast recharge combined with the capacitor being of a practical size for a car absolutely requires high voltage. The higher the voltage the more a capacitor of any given size can hold. See here for an excellent primer on capaitors.
When “charging” a capacitor, a momentary current causes the voltage to rise. Volts times electron-flow equals energy-flow ( V x I = P). Therefore during a momentary current through a capacitor, there is a joules-per-second transfer of energy from the power supply into the capacitor. (more…)
That won’t (likely) be available from the home so service stations will be converted to service that need., and they will need a lot of power.
This has deep political, technological, ecological and business ramifications.
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Comments
Comment from Doug Alder
Time: 9/28/2006, 2:43 pm
Thanks James – I look forward to reading your book. Note though this is not a battery per se it is a capacitor. The difference being that while both store energy a battery is capable of producing new electrons through chemical reaction whereas a capicitor (or condenser) can not do anything other than store a charge, it can not “create” new electrons.
If I might ask how did you make your way here as I have a small readership and haven’t seen you here before
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Comment from James Aach
Time: 9/28/2006, 2:36 pm
If there has indeed been a step change in battery technology that’s good for the electric car and everything else. Your skeptical attitude toward whether it’s real is on the mark – such things come up periodically and then fade away. One issue even if it does work is whether there are difficulties in manufacturing and any use of exotic materials.
Regarding nuclear power – I work in the nuclear industry, and one thing I can say with confidence is that the public and pundits rarely understand this power source – whether they’re for or against it. It’s a wacky combination of technology, politics and sociology. I’ve attempted to profile it accurately in my thriller novel “Rad Decision”, which is available at http://RadDecision.blogspot.com . There’s no cost to readers – who seem to like it judging from their homepage comments.
“I’d like to see Rad Decision widely read.” – Stewart Brand, internet pioneer and founder of The Whole Earth Catalog