MADRID (AP) — Spain's much-publicized plan to have thousands of electric cars on the road in the coming years appears way off target: Only 16 have been sold so far.
The government-backed REVE electric car and wind power project said on its website Tuesday that 2010 sales are at least up 15 from last year when just one was sold.
The Industry Ministry's plan was to have 2,000 electric cars on the road by the end of 2010 and 20,000 electrical and hybrid vehicles operating the following year.
In April, Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero announced the government would invest €590 million ($775 million) in promoting and developing production of electric cars over the next two years.
The plan was a key element of the government's strategy to try to help the economy.
in a bit of deja vu (see my post two down on the BMW car) Porsche unveiled a new concept car this week:
Porsche have gone on to actually build every concept car they have produced so the chances this goes into production are quite high, particularly as this represents Porsche's new business strategy: ultimate sports cars that get around 78 mpg. Expect it to cost a lot.
They want to roll out the same hybrid technology in the new Cayenne this year. maybe this is the wrong thread for this..
"Lead-acid batteries are cheap and can store large amounts of energy. But if they are repeatedly and rapidly charged and discharged - as happens when storing braking energy from an HEV and then releasing it when it accelerates - the battery's negative plate becomes coated with deposits. That limits its working life to a few years and is one reason why today's HEVs, such as the Toyota Prius, use NiMH batteries.
Lan Trieu Lam and his team of researchers at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Melbourne, Australia, have developed an UltraBattery, coupling a lead-acid battery with a supercapacitor. The combination stores as much energy as a standard lead-acid battery, but can now easily charge and discharge without deterioration.
NOW THAT IS COOL !
I have been using a lead acid battery to power my laptop in the field. I bought a 40 amp charger to rapidly charge it ( about an hour).
On the first charge it powered a 65 watt mac laptop for 16 hours (75 amp hour battery).........45 days and 100 charges later.....
I now get 3.5 hours of power on a full charge and it is dropping rapidly.
I expect the battery to be full on dead and unwilling to accept a charge in another 3 weeks.
That's about 2 months of life and 200 charges and discharges.
I might be able to extend its life by "reconditioning" it . The same 40 amp charger will "recondition" a lead acid battery by zapping it with high energy pulses of electricity over a 24 hour period. This, ostensibly, knocks the sulfates off the plates and reinvigorates the thing. Be happy to provide an update if that works.
But man....if this new low cost lead acid battery/super capacitor thing actually works.....I for one will be PSYCHED !
( note: this is a car battery and not a deep cycle battery. With a deep cycle lead acid battery I might not suffer such a rapid drop in performance. From 16 hours of juice to 3.5 hours of juice so rapidly. But most are only rated for 200 charge and recharge cycles anyway...meaning it would last much longer not having to be recharged as often....but still....... a 4x life extension would be utterly amazing to me )
Addendum to the addendum:
For those of you who wonder why I don't use a high performance lithium ion battery for the lap top that provides 4 to 6 hours of life and is rated at 300 plus charge and discharge cycles.....this is why.
CHARGE TIME.........
I can slam juice into a lead acid battery very fast with a high amp charger. You can not do that with lithium ion batteries.
The Toronto Transit Commission that runs public transit in Toronto is going back to diesel buses after batteries in the newly purchased hybrid diesel-electric buses have started to fail after only 18 months, instead of the expected 5 year life cycle.
According to a recent New Scientist:
"Lead-acid batteries are cheap and can store large amounts of energy. But if they are repeatedly and rapidly charged and discharged - as happens when storing braking energy from an HEV and then releasing it when it accelerates - the battery's negative plate becomes coated with deposits. That limits its working life to a few years and is one reason why today's HEVs, such as the Toyota Prius, use NiMH batteries.
Lan Trieu Lam and his team of researchers at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Melbourne, Australia, have developed an UltraBattery, coupling a lead-acid battery with a supercapacitor. The combination stores as much energy as a standard lead-acid battery, but can now easily charge and discharge without deterioration.
"Previous experimental systems combining capacitors and batteries have required complicated, expensive electronics to switch between using the capacitor as a short-term store when accelerating or braking, and draining the battery when cruising. Lam's team has instead simply combined battery and capacitor in parallel in one unit. By acting as a buffer during charging and discharging, the capacitor boosts the battery's life to match that of NiMH batteries, Lam says."
In lab tests the UltraBattery lasted four times as long as the best lead-acid batteries, while producing 50 per cent more power. The test vehicle the team is running "until the UltraBattery fails" has so far covered 185,000 kilometres while being recharged as needed. What's more, the cost of the battery is a third to a quarter that of NiMH batteries, says Lam, and a sixth that of the lithium-ion batteries used in some high-performance electric cars."
ETA: 2009
"Japan's Furukawa Battery Company will start manufacturing the UltraBattery on modified lead-acid battery production lines by the middle of next year. In the US battery manufacturer East Penn in Pennsylvania will make the device."
Next Generation:
"Slightly further off is a battery for use in wind-power generation. Conventional lead-acid batteries can be connected to wind turbines to maintain output for short periods when the wind falls, but they cannot prevent wind-generated power surges on the electricity grid. "The UltraBattery can smooth out the noise and provide energy for about 30 minutes, which is long enough to start up another generator," Lam says."
No, electric cars don't suck down the same amount of energy as gas guzzlers do.
By Pablo Päster
Aug. 25, 2008 | Dear Pablo,
I was excited to hear that Chevy plans to debut an electric car in 2010. But then a discussion with a friend got me thinking: If the electricity used to charge up an electric car is created by burning fossil fuels, is it better to stick with a gas-powered car with good fuel economy?
It's true that most electric cars get their electricity from the grid, which, in many states, is made up mostly of electricity from coal-fired power plants. In areas where the power comes mostly from hydro, wind or solar, your electric car would be virtually emissions-free. (Any electric-car owner can achieve this by installing a solar carport at home.)
But we can get at your question in a more precise way. The fact is, you can make an apples-to-apples comparison between an electric- and a petroleum-powered car. An electric car doesn't consume gallons of liquid fuel, so you can't measure its use of energy in miles per gallon. Similarly, conventional cars don't run on electricity, so you can't use miles per kilowatt-hour. So how do you do it?
A few months ago I had the opportunity to visit the R&D facility of Tesla Motors in San Carlos, Calif., and I spoke with people there about this very issue. While their Web site boasts a 256-mpg-equivalent efficiency, they prefer a more geek-friendly metric. I will attempt to translate it into layperson's terms.
By looking at the energy input into the vehicle, be it electricity or liquid fuel, versus the distance traveled with that energy, you can come up with a measure of efficiency. The energy unit of choice is the megajoule (1 kWh is equal to 3.6 MJ and a gallon of gasoline contains 132 MJ), and the distance measure of choice is the kilometer.
With that, there are two components to consider: the efficiency of getting energy to the car (well to tank) and the efficiency of the car itself (tank to wheel). When combined, we get an understanding of the car's well-to-wheel efficiency, which is determined by both the design of the car and its energy source.
According to Tesla, the well-to-tank efficiency of gasoline is 81.7 percent, while the well-to-battery efficiency of natural-gas-generated electricity is 52.5 percent. At first glance, the gasoline looks more efficient, but keep in mind that efficiency is lost in the combustion engine. Because of the fact that the Tesla electric roadster has no internal combustion engine and no conventional transmission, its efficiency is an impressive 2.14 km/MJ. For comparison, the hybrid Prius is 0.68 km/MJ, and a conventional Honda Civic is 0.63 km/MJ. When you combine the well-to-tank efficiency with the vehicle's efficiency, the Tesla has a well-to-wheel efficiency of 1.14 km/MJ, compared with 0.556 km/MJ for the Prius.
So the overall efficiency and emissions from the electric car are about twice as good. Because electricity from coal is about twice as dirty as the natural-gas electricity on which Tesla's numbers are based, the emissions from the electric car will, at worst, be comparable to the Prius'.
Despite this impressive efficiency, the Tesla does have a drawback (besides the fact that I'm 6 feet 3 inches tall and can't get my legs under the steering wheel). While the Tesla would be great for an average American's 30-mile commute, it is not road-trip material. (Not that the average American, by any means, could afford the car's $100,000 price tag.) With a 220-mile range and a 3.5-hour charge time, you wouldn't be able to put on the miles to get you through the boring part (corn row, corn row, corn row) of a cross-country trip in one shot.
One car that promises to solve this problem is indeed Chevy's new electric, the Volt, due out in November 2010. Since the batteries and motors have not been finalized, the overall efficiency is not yet known, but it should be well over 100-mpg equivalent. The Volt will be the opposite of a Prius in that it is an electric car with a backup gasoline generator, rather than a gasoline motor with electric backup. The Volt will function like an electric car and be able to be recharged from the electric grid, but on long road trips it will cycle its gasoline engine to top off the batteries. I am eagerly awaiting the release of the Volt — and am No. 7,792 on the unofficial waiting list. So, yes, electric and plug-in hybrid cars are a better way to go than gas guzzlers, and remain our best transportation bet in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on oil.
