news.yahoo.com — An Austin-based startup called EEStor promised "technologies for replacement of electrochemical batteries," meaning a motorist could plug in a car for five minutes and drive 500 miles roundtrip between Dallas and Houston without gasoline.
Sep 4, 2007 View in Crawl 4
apeweekSep 5, 2007
Apologies for the double-post. Firefox locked up on me just as I pushed the button (so I pushed it twice.)
logicexeSep 5, 2007
Thanks for the information, it seems as though I was wrong about how much more energy we would need to produce to supply a fleet of electric cars. I stand corrected.I still don't buy all the Big Oil conspiracy babble though. Although, it's certainly possible that auto manufacturers are slow to release electric cars due to the decreased maintenance cost associated with electric cars. Since I have your attention, do you have any sources for battery production? I hear a lot of criticisms about the cost and environmental impacts of battery production and disposal. I've always had a tough time believing that a battery can produce more pollutants in it's production and disposal than a ICE driving the same amount of miles, but I've never seen any research showing this specifically.
apeweekSep 5, 2007
I not a conspiracy theorist either. Just because two entities may share a common goal, doesn't mean they are conspiring.Judging 'battery pollution' is not a straightforward task because there are many different chemistries. However, all battery types are recyclable - and the amount of money involved is certain to encourage recycling. Newer batteries based on lithium are not environmentally harmful. In fact AltairNano even claims theirs are biodegradable. Here's what the DEQ says about Li-Ion batteries:<a class="user" href="http://www.deq.state.or.us/lq/pubs/docs/hw/Success/OnToTechnology.pdf">http://www.deq.state.or.us/lq/pubs/docs/hw/Success/OnToTechnology.pdf</a>"The lithium-ion battery on-the-other-hand, is always in solution and therefore a lithium salt (not metal) which is non-reactive. "
fyngyrzSep 5, 2007
I'm an EE with 40 years of design experience. I have solid working knowledge here. The UC's in question aren't 3500V. They are 350. See the Zenn technology release for a reference. No doubt a catastrophic failure of a UC will require venting pressure from a safety enclosure. But it will be a contained failure of a fraction of the array, not an "explosion that will kill anyone nearby", as you postulate.The amount of energy in the device will depend on the size of the array unit. I can't speculate on that until we see working models. However, I rather doubt they'll be large enough to serve as bombs.
hokie47Sep 11, 2007
Sounds like some boiler room stock pick
victoriosoSep 12, 2007
The article says : " Current batteries for these cars can easily store the energy for driving the national average commute - about 33 miles round trip a day, so the study presumes that drivers would charge up overnight when demand for electricity is much lower. "But if everyone had an hybrid vehicle and started charging it at night...the demand would be higher at night. I still like it though, it would end all these gas wars.
victoriosoSep 17, 2007
for happy scrappy : Did you see that post above ? I will try to clarify -The "spark" is creating a weld, and just using it anyway. In fact the spark can be designed to be used, instead of being considered a negative aspect. It fuses the metals. The energy transfer is five minutes, according to the article. The weld can be broken, and the car goes on its way. A big huge bar or two is not big enough for the task ?