New battery for electric vehicle

[cromwell]

Developed at Penn State University, USA.
Can allegedly be charged in ten minutes, give up to 300 miles of range and last 500,000 miles.

Very interesting, if so.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/22 ... f-battery/

[Kaz]

That sounds promising!

[Workingman]

Ten minutes - get real!

Sky has got a five minute one!

We still haven't got the electricity or charging points, though, and unlike the early days of motoring where the petrol companies paid for the refuelling infrastructure we are all going to have to pay for the hundreds of thousands of them to be installed - EV or no EV. Keep an eye on your electricity bills.

Given a choice I would go for hydrogen.

[cromwell]

Both have their pros and cons but atm given the choice I'd go for hydrogen too.

It is (correct me if I'm wrong, this is only what I have read) a more energy dense power supply than the electric battery and at the moment looks favourite to power lorries and trains because of that, replacing diesel power.

So there must be inevitably a hydrogen infrastructure to supply hgv's. OK, battery technology may progress to power those as well. So given that I'm still a little confused as to why hydrogen is getting so little support. Besides the fact that politicians have a five year attention span, obvs. Decisions taken now are going to fall to others to implement, so those making them now won't have the pain of having to make their choices a reality!

[Workingman]

Cromwell, by mass / weight it is about 2.7 times more energy dense than petrol but at thousands of times the volume. For that reason it typically has to be compressed to upwards of 5,000 psi. It is not a problem except for the anti hydrogen mob. A 10 kg gas bottle, equivalent to 10 gallons, is small in comparison to a petrol tank and when hydrogen is used in fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) coupled with an electric motor it can be two or more times more efficient than an internal combustion engine.

We can modify the existing refuelling infrastructure, or parts thereof, to fill up.

[cromwell]

I suppose how they want to tax vehicle use in the future might come into play.
You can sell and tax hydrogen like you can petrol.
Electricity, not so much. I think people who don't use EV's wouldn't be happy about paying the equivalent of petrol duty on their domestic electricity bill.
So if they want to start taxing people by how many miles they do, the authorities would prefer EV's. No need to put anymore tax on the lecky, just tax how much you use the roads.
And as you would have to have some sort of GPS tracker in your car to provide that info, maybe they would like that too; in fact I'm sure they would.

[Suff]

On the battery side, it is useful to quantify soon. Tesla have just introduced a new packaging format and size format for their batteries to increase range and reduce cost. It also allows them to reduce the battery factory footprint by 90% whilst retaining the same output volume. They expect to reduce the battery price by 50%, bringing the cost of an electric vehicle close to that of a fossil fuelled vehicle.

How long will it take them to reach their target goal of batteries for 20m vehicles (there are circa 60m to 80m vehicles made every year and projected 100m by 2030)?
10 years.
So any new technology is going to take similar time to reach maturity in the market.

Also there is the fact that only commercial vehicles really need this speed of charge where they are doing driver change over and want to keep moving at speed. Even then, the Tesla 38t articulated Semi has a range of up to 400 miles which, at an average speed of 50mph, will mean 8 hours of driving. As drivers must take a break during that 8 hour window, the 40m 80% charge the Semi can achieve means that charging is unlikely to be the biggest issue with commercial vehicles. The main issue is the weight difference between battery and drivetrain for electric and engine/fuel and drivetrain for fuel powered. Reducing load.

Personal vehicles with a 240 mile range, driving to 80% drain, gives 170 miles, over close to 3 hours at 70mph and takes around 30 minutes to 80% charge using a 130kw supercharger. For those who need longer range, 340m batteries already exist and driving time will come closer to 4 hours before a charge is required. Now I can drive constantly (with fuel and toilet stops), for up to 10 hours, easily and up to 20 hours before I must take a rest; but I don't know how many other people can. Mrs S, yes, but almost everyone else I talk to seems to have a big problem driving for more than 4 hours at a time.

Considering all the above, the average daily use of a vehicle, in the UK, is 20 miles. Granted I find 7,400 miles a year ridiculously low, but some people don't even drive 5,000 miles a year. For those with lower driving requirements, 5 minutes a day of 50kw charging will do the trick. The main issue is the availability of 50kw chargers, not even 130kw or 250kw or even the new 350kw chargers which are now starting to roll out. Most chargers, today, are 7.5kw and that takes hours to give a few extra miles.

For those who are interested in the charging numbers to back this up, most EV's today average around 3.5 miles per kw/h, over the year, including all driving conditions. That 20 miles equates to 6kw/h and 5 minutes on a 50kw charger gives 8kw/h. All mainstream Battery EV vehicles, today, have a minimum battery of 50kw/h giving a range of at least 175 miles. The days of Nissan Leaf's shipping with 25kw/h batteries are over. If you look in the company car parks, the vehicles connected to the charger all day, every day, are hybrids which have tiny batteries and the owners bought them for the one time a year they need to go long distance.

Hydrogen, where to begin?

First of all it is ruinously expensive to make Hydrogen. I know, Linde Gas is the largest manufacturer of Hydrogen in the world. Down in the operations room in Australia, they have a wall of screens and it depicts the energy cost and the manufacturing facilities. Literally production stops and starts based on the cost of energy. Hydrogen is then stored and concentrated wherever needed to be shipped to customers.

The assumption is that we will have all this spare wind power that we can turn into Hydrogen and then we'll ship the hydrogen around the country.

Reality is something different. When we reach 60% EV saturation, we will be pulling in spare wind power and storing it in our cars and commercial vehicles. The UK is very advanced in V2G (vehicle to grid), standards and technologies, leading the world and setting the pace. So spare wind and solar is likely to be stored in batteries and then released to the grid as required.

To deploy Hydrogen, we'd need a complete new Infrastructure country wide. Hydrogen has much stronger constraints on transport and storage. Hydrogen vehicles would be constrained from being stored within buildings, would not be able to go on ferries or through any tunnels, not just the channel tunnel but the alps, city underpasses, etc.

Hydrogen vehicles would have to be hydrogen/electric because the current ICE engines are only around 25% to 40% efficient and that 40% is for very large shipping engines which run at 200rpm max. So we would wind up with the ludicrous situation where we burned huge amounts of energy to crack Hydrogen, spend a fortune transporting it and storing it, only to put it into vehicles and turn it back into electricity to run them. Right now several countries are experimenting with providing truck power on overhead lines for long distance and smaller batteries for local loop delivery to avoid needing portable fuel.

Meanwhile the UK leads in cryogenic creation and storage of very high pressure air for the offline storage of renewable power. With extremely high returns (~60%), when recovering the liquified air to power again.

None of the above requires a 5m 80% charge battery. Yes it will be welcome. But it has issues too. Nickel is in incredibly short supply right now, witness Elon Musk reaching out to Nickel producers to come and talk to him directly about increasing supply. Also Nickel is heavy and the more weight you put in the pack, the more weight you have to shift. Reducing efficiency and ripping up roads more. Already 70kw/h battery packs make up over 1 ton of vehicle weight. All because people can't schedule 5 minutes into each day for charging and authorities are not putting in high enough charge rate chargers at this time. Norway, which is seeing up to 90% new battery EV's being sold each month, is starting to transition 7.5kw chargers to 50kw

If Tesla do make a success of the Semi, then the attitude to Hydrogen is going to change and change fast.

Other little known facts. When a 70kw/h battery reaches a max charge state of 60% it is of no use to an electric vehicle as it simply can't perform well enough. However a 42kw/h battery makes an extremely useful home outlet for balancing grid power and for sucking up renewables. The average home uses 30kw/h per day. Meaning the battery can buffer in low times and absorb in high times without degrading much more over the next decade.

Another little known fact. Once EV's penetrate the vehicle market and make up most of the vehicles on the road, the requirement for new Lithium, Nickel, Cobalt and manganese will drop to 10% of the per new vehicle value (even with all the vehicles being EV), because recycling will cover the other 90%. Pushing Hydrogen even further away as a fuel.

Hydrogen, or other fuels (they are considering a range of combustible fuels), will probably be reserved for truly massive engines like shipping, draglines, etc.

[Suff]

I suppose how they want to tax vehicle use in the future might come into play.
You can sell and tax hydrogen like you can petrol.
Electricity, not so much. I think people who don't use EV's wouldn't be happy about paying the equivalent of petrol duty on their domestic electricity bill.
So if they want to start taxing people by how many miles they do, the authorities would prefer EV's. No need to put anymore tax on the lecky, just tax how much you use the roads.
And as you would have to have some sort of GPS tracker in your car to provide that info, maybe they would like that too; in fact I'm sure they would.

Have you looked at the new taxation on what they call "luxury" vehicles and also the 2-6 year taxes on a new vehicle? The replacement for my MPV, because it is top of the range, goes from around £300 to over £800 for the first year and in years 2-6 it is £1,300 per year, returning to over £800 in year 7.

The rules changed in 2016 and people who buy expensive hybrids which go over 40k or a battery EV, which easily go over £40k, are being caught out with this new "luxury vehicle" tax. It is based on RRP and not the discounted dealer price.

[Workingman]

Whenever the subject of EVs comes up the fanboys always zoom in on two major positives, the negatives are either glossed over or ignored. - EVs are emissions free and environmentally friendly, you see.

They are neither.

It is true that they can offer emissions free driving, but that only happens when all their electricity is from renewables or nuclear - it isn't. They are also emissions intensive in their manufacture, from ground to showroom, same as any other vehicle. Some studies actually claim that battery production consumes so much energy that it takes significant mileage before the EV has ‘worked off’ the CO2 released during its manufacture.

When it come to them being environmentally friendly the claim is a mirage. The increase in demand for cobalt, copper and lithium has already destroyed some fragile ecosystems and that destruction continues. In addition to the destruction we are taking out elements which once used are gone unless we can recover them. We cannot make more - they are elements. Recovering them is proving to be a real challenge and at present we are not up to it.

But never mind, once the batteries are duff for car use we can park them in houses to load balance and all will be well. Tell that to the millions of us living in high-rise flats, terraced housing and maisonettes. You know, those of us who will never get a charging point.

Oh, and that hydrogen stuff - it's dangerous, BOOM, bang-a-bang! You can't bring that hydrogen car on this ship..... even though the ship is powered by a hydrogen engine. And tunnels - oh goodness me no! Yes, of course petrol tankers and LPG tankers are OK, just not hydrogen, it's way too dangerous - mum said so.

Unfortunately the evangelical EV fans have long had the ears of politicians and so much has now been invested (bet) on the one system that heaven and earth will be moved to give it the best chance of working to the exclusion of all others. Fragile eggs in one rickety basket.

And let's just body swerve the loss of about £61bn p.a. in fuel duty and other infrastructure costs when there are plenty of straw men and smoke and mirrors to explain them away.

[Suff]

Ah but it is not I who ignore all those things. I am well aware. But I have had to come to terms with some realities.

Whilst pushing people to EV does not remove CO2 unless your grid is totally CO2 neutral to start with, it has certain benefits.

First, EV vehicles are 50%, or more, efficient than fossil burners. So even if you power your EV vehicles with Coal (just about the worst), you emit less CO2 by running an EV on coal powered electric than you do by burning petrol or diesel direct in the vehicle. Also you emit nothing at the point of use so cities become cleaner.

But the next reality is this. When you have a large portion of your vehicles on battery power, switching the grid to clean energy flips every EV vehicle on the road to an immediate clean vehicle. No CO2 emissions at all. So if it takes you 30 years to move to BEV vehicles, then you can pace your grid upgrade to become CO2 neutral in the same 30 years. It's not totally clean on the way, but it is when you get there.

Hydrogen is almost the least efficient way of using your spare renewable energy. It is horrendously profligate in energy to create it then you only get 65% of the power back (on a good day), burning it in your vehicle.

It is all about round trip efficiency.

The round trip efficiency of energy storage in batteries as shown in Table 10.3 is in the range between 70% and 95%, while in the case of a hydrogen system using a 350 bar compressed gas storage, one can expect a round trip efficiency of only 47% [2]. If one allows for the use of heat released during the conversion of hydrogen back to electricity in a fuel cell on site, the overall energy efficiency can be increased to 66% [2].

This is assuming fuel cell plant equipment. Truck hydrogen use is lower than the 47% plant but the Electricity via battery is still in the 70% to 95%.

Can you imagine just how much renewable energy you would need to produce Hydrogen which is only going to net you 47% of the energy you put in?

Believe me I have asked all these questions until the guys who live this stuff are sick of it. Then I chose to educate myself. Quite simply there are few better ways of using energy than creating electricity from renewable sources and pumping it into batteries and taking it back out again in electric motors. It's a sad fact but it is a fact.

As for the rest of it? Gas, restrictions, etc? How do I know? I drive, extensively, across the channel, through Alpine tunnels, in cities with regulations which cover this stuff. I read the signs and look at the restrictions.

The only way Hydrogen is going to be used is if we find a catalyst which allows cracking of hydrogen with minimal energy input and that, today, doesn't exist. Even then, it would have to be frozen, stored, transported, distributed in a whole new network.

I was totally invested in the "we'll never do it on the grid with batteries" and "the range we need is never going to be there with BEV". I was wrong. My specific use case prohibits all but the most expensive EV vehicles. But the other 99.9997% don't have those needs.

Even now, with current technology, if you can afford it, the Tesla Model S Plaid edition has a 500 mile battery and 750,000 mile lifetime before the average battery starts to show appreciable degradation. OK I don't have £90,000 to buy one, but the technology is there, now.

The average daily drive is 20 miles. Personally I don't have 102 years to exceed the appreciable degradation window on that battery.

This is reality. This is now. We need to accept it and stop trying to find solutions which don't exist. They are put out there by companies and people who's interest is in ensuring that people DO NOT transition away from fossil fuels, to battery vehicles, any time soon. Because they'll lose their shirts.

I've had to accept that and I just ignore anything to do with Hydrogen. It is not helped by Nikola who, basically, sold a scam around hydrogen trucks. It was a total Scam and I suspect their founder and ex CEO is going to go to jail. When the SEC gets around to dragging him into court.