Plug-In » Charging

New Tech Promises EV Charge Times Measured in Minutes

JonZeke — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 18:03:26 +0000

Researchers at Nanotek Instruments, Inc, and its subsidiary Angstrom Materials in Dayton, Ohio have developed a breakthrough in energy storage design which outpaces supercapacitor and battery technologies. The new devices could not only power long-range and fast charging future electric cars but also provide efficient energy storage capacity to renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and hydro. Called surface-mediated cells (SMCs), the fundamental breakthrough behind the technology is that it isn’t actually a battery at all. The elegance of the SMC design is that it is not only simpler in design, but already has shown significant increases in energy density and power density despite using less -than-optimized materials and construction. So far, the prototype SMC cells have demonstrated a power density 100 times higher than that of commercial Li-ion batteries and 10 times higher than that of supercapacitors. Power density, in lay terms, is the amount of power an energy source has per unit volume. Crucially, power is a measurement of time rate of energy transfer. The higher the power density, the faster the rate of energy transfer (which results in a faster recharge time.)

Additionally, the SMC design has shown to have an energy density of 160 Watt-hour/kgcell, which is comparable to commercial Li-ion batteries and 30 times higher than that of conventional supercapacitors. The greater the energy density, the more energy the device can store for the same volume (resulting in a longer driving range for electric vehicles). Again, here the massive graphene structures of the prototype cells have not yet been optimized, so potential exists for even greater energy density in future iterations.

While most research into energy storage in either battery or supercapacitor technology has focused on either improving the power density of lithium-ion batteries or increasing the energy density of supercapacitors, both approaches have significant inherent challenges. By creating a fundamentally new paradigm in energy storage, SMCs could allow researchers to circumvent those issues.

The elegance of SMC design is its ability to bridge the gap between relatively long-range but slow charging Li-ion batteries and fast charging but distance-challenged supercapacitors. Researchers might finally have a method to create both high power and energy dense cells without sacrificing one for the other.

The critical difference between an SMC and a battery is that the ions in an SMC exchange rapidly between graphene surfaces, instead of moving laborously through the bulk of the electrode as in a typical lithium-ion battery. The time consuming process of intercalation – where the ions have to be inserted into the electrodes of a battery – is sidestepped with an SMC. The large surface area of the graphene cathode and the short distance the ions travel through the electrolyte permit the high observed energy and power densities. SMC cell lifetimes are still being explored, but so far observed cycling has shown no more than a 5% reduction of capacity.

While Angstrom Materials’ primary business is the sale of pricey graphene, it is engaged in massively scaling up graphene production to reduce the cost of the material dramatically over the next few years. As a result, the researchers on the project do not see any significant hurdles to overcome for commercialization to occur.

Unlike many other promised but unrealized breakthroughs in energy storage, the science and research behind SMCs is sound. With few major hurdles to overcome, the use of graphene cells could radically advance the promise of EVs in a short span of time. Assuming the technology reaches market, we could be looking back at charging times of the current crop of electrified vehicles as quaint within a decade. An electric car that charges back up in minutes? It could be the critical tipping point when EVs and plug-ins go from luxury to ubiquity.

Resources:

Bor Z. Jang, Chenguang Liu, David Neff, Zhenning Yu, Ming C. Wang, Wei Xiong, Aruna Zhamu (2011) Graphene Surface-Enabled Lithium Ion-Exchanging Cells: Next-Generation High-Power Energy Storage Devices. Nano Letters Article ASAP doi: 10.1021/nl201849

Nissan Using Leaf to Power Homes

JonZeke — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 16:29:26 +0000

While the traditional fossil fuel vehicle is pretty much a dead weight when it’s not in use, electric cars offer promise of increased utility. Automakers have been on a roll finding – and implementing – novel ways of integrating the electric car into our lives. Ford’s foray into sustainable energy partnership with SunPower is one just positive step forward. On August 2nd, Nissan took a similarly bold step forward in increasing the utility of electric cars in our lives with the introduction of the “Leaf to Home” system.

The process uses the Leaf’s 24kWh (killowatt hour) battery to power a house. Through the system, the Leaf battery connects to the home power distribution panel using a special connector linked to the Leaf’s standard charging port. The power control system is a two way design that can be used to charge the Leaf conventionally, but in the advent of a brown or blackout, the Leaf’s battery returns electricity to the home. Designed for Japanese homes, which use an average of 12kWh of electricity a day, the Leaf to Home system would barely supply an energy voracious American home for a day (typical American homes suck down 30kWh of juice daily).

Nissan is working with commercial partners to produce the system, and expect production by the end of the year. With the recent disruption in electricity production in Japan as a result of the Tohuku Earthquake, and ensuing shutting down of nuclear power stations, Japanese households have been subjected to brownouts and blackouts with increasing frequency. Nissan hopes the Leaf to Home system can help alleviate the effect of these occurrences. Nissan also believes this two way system could also be beneficial in reducing overall household electricity consumption, providing energy back to the grid during peak demand during the day (if the car isn’t being used) and recharging the battery at night when demand is low. In conjunction with sustainable energy production methods such as solar, it could reduce a household’s demand to zero in certain circumstances.

Hopefully other manufacturers take heed of Nissan’s system and partner with other household energy providers to bring out more systems like this. By making the car become an integral part of the energy usage composition of a home, households can take a major step forward in reducing their energy consumption. Considering the number of households with cars, the impact could be significant. The downside to this system is how starkly consumptive American households are with electricity. Reducing our home consumption, adding renewable energy sources such as solar – and cleverly making our vehicles do more work than just burn energy could radically reshape domestic energy concerns. Of course the installation and construction of these systems means more jobs too. In this difficult economic climate, that’s something everyone can agree on.

Ford Teams Up With SunPower For Solar Powered Electric Vehicles

JonZeke — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 15:50:00 +0000

One of the great hopes behind electrified vehicles is reduced dependence of not only foreign oil, but all polluting energy sources. In a step towards that greater goal, Ford announced that they have teamed up with solar energy panel manufacturer SunPower. While not the first domestic manufacturer to team up with a solar energy provider (GM recently announced a $7.5million investment in Sunlogics), they are the first to provide a customer-centric solution towards decreased grid-dependence.

The fruit of the team up is a rooftop solar system designed to provide Focus Electric owners enough renewable energy to offset the electricity used for charging. The 2.5Kw SunPower system is projected to provide 3000 kilowatt hours of energy annually.

“Under the ‘Drive Green for Life’ program, Focus Electric owners can reduce their total cost of ownership by generating enough energy from their high efficiency SunPower rooftop solar system to offset the electricity required to charge the vehicle at night,” said Mike Tinskey, Ford director of Global Vehicle Electrification and Infrastructure. “It’s an eco-friendly solution that perfectly complements our plug-in products and other green initiatives.”

The panels are sized to provide approximately 1000 miles of driving for an average customer. Ford and SunPower intend the system to be an offset to customer’s charging needs, and would provide renewable energy back to the grid when they are charging during the day.

The SunPower E18 panel at the heart of the system is touted by the company as being 50% more efficient than competitive systems. The total panel conversion by the E18 panel is 18.5%, which makes it a competitive solution to most of its current competitors in the home solar market.

The complete SunPower solar system is offered at a base price of less than $10,000, after federal tax credits. Local and state rebates, along with other incentives, may drive the system cost down even more, depending on a customer’s location. Included in the purchase is a residential monitoring system, which includes the ability to track the performance of their solar system on the web or through an iPhone application.

For the coin consumers won’t be saving money in a direct comparison with just buying a gasoline powered Focus, but that isn’t the point. The goal of the project is to spur interest in home solar initiatives as being directly related to plug in driving. As the cost of solar systems continue to drop more of these home systems would make plug in motoring a truly green alternative.

SunPower has worked with other automakers in the past, putting the largest rooftop solar installation in North America on Toyota’s North American Part Center California.

The Cost of Electric Car Convenience

JonZeke — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 18:19:34 +0000

Wonder how pricing is determined for the Nissan Leaf? How does GM know exactly how many units of the Volt the market will accept? While consumers might assume a lot of guess work manages these decisions, automakers prefer not to leave multi-billion-dollar risks to chance. Recent research from University of Delaware informs a lot of these complex choices made in the boardrooms of the major automakers and in policy meetings in Washington D.C.

One study from UD revealed the top attributes buyers consider in an electric car: driving range, fuel cost savings and charging time. The results of the nationally-conducted study were authored by UD professors George Parsons, Willett Kempton and Meryl Gardner, and lead by economics doctoral recpient Michael Hidrue. Hidrue’s dissertation lead to the ranking and understanding of these findings. A second study, published a month later in March of 2011 looked at second-by-second driving records of nearly 500 vehicles nationally to determine optimal driving ranges for electric vehicles. This study, authored by Kempton, UD marine policy graduate student Nathaniel Pearre, and colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology released convincing data to determine how many more plug in cars the national automotive market would accept.

The results of the first study emerged through a sampling of 3000 individuals nationwide. Each of the factors revealed prices consumers would find acceptable for a given level of performance. For example, when looking at driving ranges it was determined that consumers value each additional mile of a car’s range at approximately $75 per mile up to 200 miles, while from 2-300 miles each mile of range was worth only $35 per mile. If then, an electric car had a range of 200 miles, and an otherwise similar gas car had a range of 300 miles, people would require a price discount of around $3500 for the electric version. This data assumes all other attributes of a car are the same, from design to features and performance.

“This information tells the car manufacturers what people are willing to pay for another unit of distance,” Parsons said. “It gives them guidance as to what cost levels they need to attain to make the cars competitive in the market.”

When looking at battery charge, and acceptable premiums for faster charging, the team discovered consumers would be willing to accept a $427 increase in cost per hour reduction of charge time if a car with a 50 mile range’s charge time halved from 10 hours to 5. For a drop from 5 hours to 1 hour, consumers would pay an estimated $930 per hour. In the advent of truly fast charging technologies, it was revealed that consumers would be willing to pay $3250 if charge times reduced from one hour to 10 minutes.

Unsurprisingly, the research team found that battery costs need to decrease a dramatic amount without subsidy to be competitive against gas cars for the price of gas at the time of the study. Yet they observed that the government’s $7500 tax credit could effectively mitigate the difference between the cost of an electric car and consumer’s interest in paying if battery costs decrease to $300 per kilowatt hour – the projected Department of Energy cost for batteries expected by 2014.

The reach of the first study was extensive enough to bolster marketing department budgets. The analysis showed that an individual’s acceptance of electric cars increased with factors such as youth, education and how environmentally conscious their lifestyle was. Income factors were not considered important to predicting who would likely buy an electric vehicle.

The second study’s results showed that 9% of vehicles never travelled more than 100 miles a day. Perhaps you have seen this data in other places in media recently. For drivers willing to borrow or rent a gasoline car 6 times per year, the 100 mile range would work for 32% of all driving Americans.

“It appears that even modest electric vehicles with today’s limited battery range, if marketed correctly to segments with appropriate driving behavior, comprise a large enough market for substantial vehicle sales,” the authors concluded.

Professor Kempton noted that in a non-recession car buying year with approximately 12 million units sold, that 9% figure would be a solid 1 million cars – far in excess of the current production plans for the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt. Nevertheless automakers are aware of this research and many have announced plans to capture this growing market. Chevrolet has also responded by increasing production to 45,000 units this year en route to a 120,000 unit a year goal.

The findings of the two studies were reported online in Resource and Energy Economics, and Transportation Research.

Faster Battery Technology a Major Milestone?

Rick — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 04:48:45 +0000

Perhaps the single greatest barrier to widespread adoption of plug-in automobiles is the time it takes to charge them. We have looked into charging times in the past, and even with the most advanced infrastructure in place at charging stations, you are still looking at one hour or more to fully recharge your battery. The automobile industry (and investors), however, have not been deterred, and many have pointed to a trend in developing lower-cost, more efficient rechargeable batteries. Lately, it seems, their optimism has been warranted.

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign have built a prototype battery that can conceivably reduce charge times down to mere minutes.

Lithium-ion batteries, like all batteries, work by connecting two electrodes through an electrically conductive material — called an electrolyte. When that battery is charging and discharging, negatively-charged electrons flow between each electrode while positively-charged ions flow to balance out the charges. As the image to the right shows, lithium has recently become the material of choice due to the amount of energy it can store relative to its weight. Nickel-metal hydride batteries are still in use, however, and come at a cheaper cost.

The breakthrough in this instance comes from increasing the surface area between the electrodes and the electrolyte: a critical factor in determining the recharging rate. At the same time, they were able to maintain a large battery volume, a key attribute to storing maximum energy. The researchers were able to accomplish this by starting off with a material made up of closely packed polystyrene spheres, each about one-millionth of a meter in diameter. The gaps between the spheres were filled with nickel through a process called electrodeposition. The porosity of this nickel-layer could be increased using electropolishing, creating a framework conducive for placing electric cathodes.

Both a nickel-metal hydride and a lithium-ion battery were created using this material, and in both cases the area of contact between the nickel, the electrolyte, and the cathodes were greatly increased. The researchers claimed that they were able to re-charge a lithium-ion battery to 90% capacity in two minutes! Furthermore, they say the increase in production costs to manufacture such a battery should only be 20-30% higher than current techniques, once these batteries start becoming mass produced.

The Future?

So, will these new batteries revolutionize plug-in cars? The answer is not so simple. The huge current that is necessary to charge a battery so quickly would require significant upgrades to a car’s electrics as well as to charging stations. It is also uncertain whether these faster-charging batteries affect battery life. These concerns aside, however, this could be a major step in the right direction. Like we mentioned earlier, charge-times are a major barrier to customer adoption of plug-ins. Charging overnight is fine — but wasting significant time at a charging station is most likely a deal-breaker. If advances in battery technology such as this one shatter that barrier, the positives of electric cars might finally outweigh the negatives… which would indeed create a revolution.

Charging Your Car While Driving?

Rick — Sun, 24 May 2009 05:08:19 +0000

One of the thorniest issues facing the mass adoption of electric-only vehicles is the time it takes to charge them – plugging in for a couple hours seems cumbersome for anyone wanting to drive more than just to work and back. There have been several solutions proposed, such as waiting for advances in battery technology, battery-swapping stations, and improving charging standards and infrastructure. A group of engineers in South Korea, however, have proposed and tested an idea that is totally different: letting the road charge your vehicle while you drive.

The scientists from South Korea’s acclaimed KAIST University have already begun work on a project that aims to lay induction strips on city roadways to charge fleets of buses and cars. They would be about 20 to 90 centimeters wide and several hundred meters long. Vehicles that are outfitted with sensors and magnetic devices would be able to receive power through a process called inductive charging, without coming into direct contact with the strips. Additionally, cars will be outfitted with a very small battery that can provide additional range.

Safety issues are expected to be minimal as humans and animals would be able to touch the strips without receiving a shock.

A few buses on KAIST campus are already making use of the technology, and the capital of Seoul, with its population of 10 million and fleet of 9,000 gasoline-powered buses, has promised to set aside funds to construct the roadway charging system. Test runs are expected to start within a year.

The engineers at KAIST were provided government grants of $50 million to fund two projects, one of which led to this development. It is unclear, however, what the costs would be to extend this idea to a major city. One spokesman at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology estimates the price at $318,000 per kilometer of road. That does not include the cost of upgrading vehicles. It seems feasible that a small fleet of buses running along a lightly travelled route can be used as a test scenario.

Undoubtedly, many cities around the globe will be watching the initial test-runs in Seoul. Yet with so many varying proposals for electric-vehicle technology coming out, it is hard to predict which model, or models, will finally prevail.

Growing Consensus that Plug-In Vehicles Will Benefit Utilities

Rick — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 05:57:12 +0000

With one of the biggest challenges of mass-adoption of plug-in vehicles being the possibility of overloaded power grids, many utilitily companies feel that they already have the solution: Install upgraded transformers in areas where the demand for electric vehicles is the highest, and charge consumers different rates according to peak hours of demand.

Pacific Gas & Electric is already implementing a tiered system, charging electric car owners 5 cents per kilowatt hour between midnight and 7 a.m., and 30 cents per kilowatt hour between 2 p.m. and 9 p.m.

Furthermore, there is continued talk about sending electricity back into the grid when an electric vehicle is not in use. For more insight into the infrastructure concerns of power companies, read our previous story.

Plug-In » Charging

New Tech Promises EV Charge Times Measured in Minutes

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Nissan Using Leaf to Power Homes

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The Cost of Electric Car Convenience

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Faster Battery Technology a Major Milestone?

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