Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Lithium Battery Breakthrough

Ars Technica Lithium breakthrough could charge batteries in 10 seconds "A new version of lithium battery technology can either provide a higher storage density than current batteries, or can charge and discharge as fast as a supercapacitor, emptying its entire charge in under 10 seconds."

The article gets into some details and this could be huge. Then again, it ends with this:

"A more significant problem is that these batteries may wind up facing an electric grid that was never meant to deal with them. A 1Wh cell phone battery could charge in 10 seconds, but would pull a hefty 360W in the process. A battery that's sufficient to run an electric vehicle could be fully charged in five minutes—which would make electric vehicles incredibly practical—but doing so would pull 180kW, which is most certainly not practical."

But didn't Obama want to upgrade the electric grid to deal with alternative energy? Hmmmm....

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Minor technical issues. Charge density can be accumulated locally (home/office/vehicle charging stations [gas stations in today's world]) during off peak hours and then delivered as needed. In fact ou could even use a scaled up model of the new lithium batteries themselves.

If coast to coast gas stations were required for the auto industry to progress, we would all still be riding horses.