Lithium-ion Battery War
As everyone knows by now, the battery war is on. GM has officially picked two companies to take their respective battery cells and figure out how to string them together and keep them cool so that they can power the car, handle many deep cycle drains, last at least 100,000 miles, and not evolve into a hellacious fireball when the car inevitably crashes at highway speed. This is one tall order and will serve to be a heck of a fight. In a move of genius, GM is pitting the two companies against each other in competition.
In the first corner is Compact Power. A nice article from Detroit News appears today, in which the CEO of Compact Power (using LG Chem’s Korean made cells) was interviewed. The author describes the battery pack as the weight and size of an NFL linebacker- 6 feet tall 360 pounds - and containing hundreds of Li-ion cells each the size of a flattened Capri juice box, and each 10 times more powerful than a typical cell phone battery cell.
In the other corner, we have is of course Continental AG, a German company who is using A123’s American-made cells.
What is clear at this point is that the individual cells exist, and they can already be strung together into a sufficient power supply needed to drive the car. Whether they can be kept safe, cool, and durable…thats the billion dollar question.
Its a 12 round fight..one per month..with the winner being announced in June 08, or hopefully sooner if the knockout arrives.
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June 12th, 2007 at 7:25 am
::Whether they can be kept safe, cool, and durable…thats the billion dollar question.
How many times does this have to be repeated: lithium phosphate batteries do not have any safety or cooling issues to speak of, not more than lead-acid for example.
They are entirely different animals from your laptop fireworks cells which are lithium-cobalt chemistry.
And durability of A123 cells has been tested by countless thousands of DeWalt power tool users and RC hobbyists out there.
There is no billion dollars involved there. Production costs are much more of a question mark, but with sufficient volume this should be no problem.
June 12th, 2007 at 9:01 am
AeroVironment successfully quick charged the Altair Nanotechnologies 35kWh zero strain battery pack in under 10 minuets? http://www.autobloggreen.com/2007/05/30/aerovironment-successfully-quick-charges-altair-nanotechnologie/ The Altair material selection may be better than that of A123.
The GM engineers recently told autobloggreen.com that they have never even heard of Altair Nano and their NanaSafe batteries. How is this possible? Do they live in a cave or are they really just stalling as long as they can.
According to this September 1993 issue of the US Gov’t D.O.E.s Office of Transportation Technology’s HEV Technical Advisor paper… “After investigating both the Gas Turbine and the Stirling Engine, the choice of the HPU (Hybrid Power Unit) was narrowed to the Stirling engine.” GM completed this work in 1993 for God’s sake! http://www.p2pays.org/ref/16/15287.pdf
Now, I understand that the new gas turbines produces in 1998 with newer alloys, a recuperator, and foil bearings was 3X more efficient than even the best piston engines when both are running at optimal RPM like in a genset. Turbines only have 1 moving part and that’s why the airliners us them for onboard power. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_turbine
There is so much smoke at GM that we can’t even find the mirrors.
June 12th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
GM!!! - Time is running out, can we stop squabbling? Lithium batteries will do just fine, notwithstanding nothing is perfect. If we wait for faultlessness we will be talking about electric car next century. After all the Mars Exploration Rovers carry lithium batteries and they keep going since 2004.
Plug away where we left off (I believe back in 1936??).
Sash
P.S. Where do I sign up for Volt? I really don’t care if I have to change battery pack after 10 years.
June 13th, 2007 at 12:10 am
Well guys, like they said, the individual cells are pretty much ready. They are safe, and they would store the energy needed.
The work that needs to be done now, is to string them all together, and provide for charging and cooling.
I’d venture that 12 months is a good enough time to build a battery pack or unit ready to be bolted into a chassis and hooked up to it’s systems.
Hopefully one of these companies will do so quicker, get the design to and approved by GM, then they can start producing the packs before GM starts mass producing the rest of the vehicle. That way packs will be ready and waiting to be installed on the assembly line.
June 13th, 2007 at 12:28 am
I have never seen a company so up front about its newer baby like GM has been with the VOLT. I do believe it will be here before or by 2010. I am also a true believer that we are F the planet and that the VOLT and its technology is not just a transportation need, but a need for our own national security and climate stability as well. I do not think we will be around in 2015 with a need for a car. By then a stone, an arrow, and a horse will be more essential if GM does build the VOLT soon.
Join in the ReVOLT-lution.
June 13th, 2007 at 10:17 am
Remember, the Volt needs to get it’s power from somewhere. The electrical grid is pretty taxed as it is on both production and transmission.
The fear the problem will present itself - environmentalists don’t want more power plants built, be they nuclear or coal fired (even though new coal plants are something like 98% cleaner than old ones).
So I hope that environmentalists don’t shoot us in the foot in that respect.
June 13th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Making sure that the batteries not create a “hellacious fireball when the car inevitably crashes at highway speed. This is one tall order…”
EXCUSE ME! We currently drive using a fuel which has the equivalent of 14 sticks of dynamite per gallon!
We don’t whine about how we can’t use gasoline fuel till we can make it non combustable!
We simply design strong containers for the fuel tank and crashtest it till its safe. So just as with the dangerous 14 stick dynamite fuel we currently use, protection is not the batteries job, it is the job of the design of the protection to CONTAIN the batteries.
June 13th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
Matt 986, have you heard of wind power perhaps?
The DOE says it can power the country one and a half times
“Wind Energy Resource Potential
Good wind areas, which cover 6% of the contiguous U.S. land area, have the potential to supply more than one and a half times the current electricity consumption of the United States.”
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/windandhydro/wind_potential.html
Could it be that you have heard of solar power perhaps?
Wall Street sure has, investment in solar is up 33%:
http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2007/03/solar_installat.html
costs are coming down 40%
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/06/solar_photovolt_2.php
Other countries are pioneering new green energy that the US could be doing too
http://enviro.org.au/enews-description.asp?id=723
It is not just us environmentalists that understand the dangers of nuclear energy.
Wall Street will no longer invest in nuclear. Insurance companies won’t insure it.
Thats why Bush’s nuclear cronies wanted and got $9 billion in guarantees that we taxpayers will foot the bill when some terrorist uses our nuke plant to dirtynuke us or when the leaching out of the waste into our groundwater destroys our health.
Just because environmentalists don’t like dirty power, doesn’t mean we never heard of clean power. The fossil fools need to stop preventing windpower and stop creating supposed astroturf “environmentalists objections” to wind turbines on some bogus matter like bird kills. It is totally without merit. All the environmental groups want windpower, and we do know that global warming will impact every member of the human species and that outweighs a few birds(FAR less than what cats kill)
For $1300 per household Holland just put up a windfarm in the ocean. Each tower took 24 hours to erect. Cost $4 million each and powers 3,000 homes each. Because they are spread out over large areas, its always blowing somewhere.
Another reason for EVs is that EVs are the perfect storage for non baseload power sources like solar and wind power, making them baseload possible to replace coal, and thats why green public utilities (like in California) want us to move into EV driving.
http://blogs.business2.com/greenwombat/2007/06/photo_green_wom.html
June 13th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Susan,
You are aware that France gets (IIRC) 70% of it’s electrical energy from nuclear power, right? It can be done safely, it IS done safely, but people’s fears relate to 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl. How many meltdowns and ecological disasters have occurred in France? I’m thinking a huge 0. Texas is getting two new nuclear plants soon.
I’m aware of wind and solar power. They are great supplements to the grid. Since we can’t just turn on the sun or turn on the wind, they will only remain supplemental.
If you think wind farms are being suppressed, you need to drive IH10 from Austin to LA sometime. Earlier this year driving to Phoenix, I saw several large windfarms in West Texas. A few years ago going to L.A., I saw large wind farms right at the border of AZ and CA.
‘Alternative’ power sources are great, but simply can’t generate enough power reliably like nuclear or coal can.
Maybe something like a molten salt reactor could be used (look it up on Wikipedia). Or maybe in other areas, geothermal. You are also aware that nuclear fuel can be recycled, right?
Bottom line is, solar and wind generations will only supplement our demand for power. Other ‘green’ sources like the hydroelectric system in Holland won’t work for places like Iowa which has no ocean close to it. We will continue to need generation that can be 100% on demand.
June 13th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Matt 986, on what basis are you rejecting the DOE’s estimate that wind is good for 150% of the country’s energy needs?
If nuclear fuel is so recyclable, why are we talking about burying nuclear waste in Nevada?
June 13th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
Dollar for dollar you get more from wind than nuclear. The wind farm I mentioned in Holland (not hydroelectric - its a wind farm) is an example of how cost effective and quick wind power can be, going up in a day. If we had spent the same dollars on wind as we spent on nuclear we would now have a reliable longterm source of power that would not run out.
But in 70 years we will have empty concrete nuke plants (that probably will have taken two decades and numerous taxbailed cost overruns) because Uranium supplies will be so depleted by ravenous Chinese energy demand. Do you want to invest in nuclear - dependant on a dwindling Uranium supply, and have nothing to fire up the oven with in a century?
Another thing about nuclear is, like coal, it uses up boatloads of water. Water shortages are exacerbated by global warming and in Australia they are having to choose between drinking or turning on the lights.
They are shutting down coal power plants.
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,21189976-5005340,00.html
I think its really important that we invest the last of peak oil energy in building a PERMANENT energy supply which wind and solar loaded into EVs would be.
The EVs act as the storage so wind and solar would be available “100% on demand”. Heres how it would work:
http://blogs.business2.com/greenwombat/2007/06/photo_green_wom.html
I want power that will power our great great grandchildren on todays investment. You’ve seen it in Texas. Iowa and Idaho and Montana and South and North Dakota have fantastic wind potential, like Texas. And the states that are short on wind are fabulous solar states.
Wind farms don’t have to be out in the ocean. Holland just put that wind farm in the ocean because unlike us in the US they are a tad short of space. Theres wind and solar in many places globally. Europe is looking at new transmission to get solar power from the Sahara desert to power Europe.
http://www.solarserver.de/solarmagazin/solar-report_0207_e.html
June 13th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
And France is 70% nuclear.
Healthy AND clean energy can power countries too.
New Zealand is 75% hydroelectric.
Hawaii is 30% solar.
Navarre is 100% wind.
Iceland is 100% geothermal.
Ocean energy could supply up to 300,000 MW
http://www.machinedesign.com/ASP/strArticleID/57260/strSite/MDSite/viewSelectedArticle.asp
Abu Dabi is investing in solar.
http://www.waleg.com/archives/006925.html
June 13th, 2007 at 5:28 pm
This energy hearing on renewable power with Senator Bingaman’s Energy And Natural Resources Committee: turns out
Oregon has enough wavepower to get 100% of their energy needs from ocean power!
Some good listening! Reccomended:
http://energy.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Hearings.Hearing&Hearing_ID=1636
Witnesses
Panel 1
The Honorable C. Stephen Allred, U.S. Department of Interior
J. Mark Robinson, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
Mr. Michael Grainey, Oregon Department of Energy
Panel 2
Mr. Jason Bak - CEO, Finavera Renewables, Inc.
Mr. Jaime Steve, American Wind Energy Association
June 13th, 2007 at 6:51 pm
Further in to the same energy hearing: Alaska has EVEN MORE than 100% of its total energy needs available as ocean power!
This stuff really should be headline news!
What is wrong with our media? Oh, did Paris burp?
June 13th, 2007 at 9:27 pm
Well actually the power grid issue is a bit simpler than all of this discussion. The vast majority of the owners, above 90%, will recharge their Volts in the evening through night. Due to the operating mass of the generators, both mechanical and thermal, it is impracticle to greatly reduce generator capacity at night. Power companies offer large users reduced rates for off-peak consumption to encourage them to use power intensive processes (kilns, heat treat ovens, bakeries, etc) at night. Home consumers are not offered off-peak rates (the cost of the metering equipment isn’t worth the limited savings) so the power companies can sell excess capacity at full price. A quick e-mail to Western Resources got me the response that they are ready and very happy to have me plug my Volt in at night. An important note here is that off-peak usage will also not greatly increase emmisions from the powerplants as they are already running. Reduced emmisions from charging a Volt vs running an engine should be very real.
A side comment on wind power. I live in Kansas, we measure the wind in pounds. A ten pound wind is when a ten pound rock starts rolling. We have a few wind farms, but every attempt at expanding them has been met with protests from groups who don’t like their sound, say they ruin the landscape (remember this is Kansas!), and worst of all; kill birds. Things will have to get worse before they will get better.
June 14th, 2007 at 6:18 am
“Further in to the same energy hearing: Alaska has EVEN MORE than 100% of its total energy needs available as ocean power!
This stuff really should be headline news!
What is wrong with our media? Oh, did Paris burp?”
Now thats funny right there…
Johnnie
June 14th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Well, aren’t we all learning things!
I’d sure love wind generation around here in Central Texas. We get TONS of wind!! If 150% of our nations demand could be met by wind generation, well COOL. I’d suspect that would be ‘up to’ 150%, since, as mentioned before, we can’t turn on the wind on calm days. Having multiple interconnected sites across the country could alleviate that… to an extent. It’s worth looking into. Wind is free, let’s freakin use it!
Regardless, with vehicles like the Volt, and other EVs, we need to get the power from SOMEWHERE.
Ideally, I’d love to have a house with some solar panels and a wind generator on the roof. Let that charge up a residential battery system during the day, feed any excess energy back to the grid, and then use the stored energy to charge my EV at night.
As for the nuke recycling, from what I know about it, there was some stupid law or act passed in the 70s that prevents recycling nuclear materials… so the waste gets buried. Change that, and we can get more out of it.
And as always… I COULD BE WRONG.
June 14th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
Matt986: knew you didn’t belong on the wrong side! Or why read where we all come to hope for a better world? Environmentalists are your friends in this!
TO GM:
I was tabling for the SFEVA at an ecofest Saturday: got A LOT of interest in the RAV4 EV we were next to.
GM, nobody is doing a real SUV EV like the RAV4: (the Phoenix SUV EV is more sedan-size)
Everyone who wants one needs room for 2 grownups and 3 kids in car seats and two smelly dogs in the very back.
Add a RAV4-type of SUV to your EV line of Volt technology design options! I Promise: you will make a killing and get near every SUV off the road!
Sell em to the military to destroy in Iraq.
June 14th, 2007 at 6:44 pm
Well, don’t get me wrong Susan, I’m not a, nor do I really like, extremist environmentalists.
I’m all about our nation being self sufficient, though. I’d LOVE to read a headline someday - “US Buys It’s Last Barrel Of Oil From Mideast. Acheives 100% Domestic Energy Production”
If it can be done from wind, solar, tidal and geothermal, or other ‘green’ sources, that’s great! I say do it for independence. The environmental stuff, to me, is a side benefit.
I participate in several other forums, some car related, some related to other hobbies of mine… and there are still a lot of people that pooh-pooh the EV idea, either because they’ll blow up, or they’ll crash the grid when everyone plugs in. I’ve succeded in educating a few, and will try to do more.
June 14th, 2007 at 7:15 pm
“US Buys It’s Last Barrel Of Oil From Mideast. Acheives 100% Domestic Energy Production”
… but requires vast quantities of lithium from South America.
June 15th, 2007 at 8:28 am
Lithium can ultimately just be de-salinated out of seawater so there will never be “peak lithium”, but currently its Chile and Australia and eventually China…not South Africa
http://www.the-infoshop.com/press/ros42739_en.shtml
“Chile and Australia - together account for nearly two-thirds of world output, and for most of the growth in production in the first part of this decade. Sons of Gwalia in Australia produces some 60% of world output of lithium minerals (as spodumene), with output estimated at 120,000t (gross weight) in 2005. SQM of Chile, with shipments of 27,800t lithium carbonate in 2005, accounted for 36% of world production. This share will increase from 2008, following the companys planned expansion in production capacity from 28,500tpy to 40,000tpy.
An interesting feature of world lithium production is the potential emergence of China as a leading supplier.”
June 15th, 2007 at 8:39 am
Matt986,
To know the devious anti American workings of us “extremist environmentalist” groups (according to Exxon) - look at this hardhitting EV advertisement the NRDC (biggest extremist environmental group) made:
http://jcwinnie.biz/wordpress/?page_id=1792
June 20th, 2007 at 10:15 pm
Altair nanoSafes are so expensive at present that they cannot build a barebones small electric truck worth around $17K and sell it for $45K without massive ZEV credits for each vehicle. The fact that the batteries recharge in 10 minutes is pretty much irrelevant for a plug-in like the VOLT - nobody’s house has a circuit that can pump out more than around 7 kilowatts anyway, which I understand that the A123 System’s batteries can accept. I also question the notion of Altair batteries
being viable for any hybrid applications
at this point. Gotcher of Altair said that he hopes to bring the costs down to $500 per kWhr , but that will take some time,
probably years. I happen to know that seevral GM engineers have commented somewhat favorably on the Altair batteries,
and I seriously doubt that the GM engineer who said he wasn’t familiar with Altair batteries has anything whatsoever to do with their battery department. Why are you assuming that he was? Do you even know what kind of an engineer he is? I suppose you all realize that GM is NOT developing the batteries for this vehicle. GM, in case you didn’t know, develops and builds AUTOMOBILES, not batteries. The name is General MOTORS, not General Battery Corp.
And one might wonder why Consolidated chose A123 Systems batteries rather than Altairs if they are so promising? The answer is very clear - Altair batteries are too expensive and too heavy. The fact that they can be recharged quickly is irrelevant for plug-in applications, where only home-based, low wattage power sources are available. I also note that none of the major automakers have selected Altairs, yet every one of them is associated with a major battery maker and working on plug-in vehicles. I predict that there will be several plug-ins available around the same time the VOLT is ready. Thus the notion that GM is both controlling the technology and for some strange ,inexplicable reason stalling the progress is nonsensical and bizarre. I’d love to hear the supposed motivation for spending hundreds of millions to build nothing. That would be quite a business plan. Perhaps it’s so they can continue to slide into bankruptcy by remaining an ICE manufacturer.
June 24th, 2007 at 8:46 pm
Matt 986, have you heard of wind power perhaps?
The DOE says it can power the country one and a half times
“Wind Energy Resource Potential
Good wind areas, which cover 6% of the contiguous U.S. land area, have the potential to supply more than one and a half times the current electricity consumption of the United States.”
How much wind is available is totally irrelevant. The fact is that wind is the absolute worst method of producing tiny amounts of uncontrollable, nondispatchable
unreliable power. I might add that flowing water posseses 822 times more energy than ephemeral wind. Also that wind is exorbitantly expensive compared to nuclear power, costing 6 times as much per power
produced per year. Without the billions of Federal subsidies, no one would errect another wind turbine. Economically it’s a disaster. And the power it produces doesn’t
even equal 25% of just the increase in yearly power demand. There are far superior
alternative energy technologes on the horizon to waste any more taxpayer money on useless wind power.
July 2nd, 2007 at 7:24 pm
How can anyone mention nuclear as cheaper than wind. Have you ever seen the amount of subsidies that nukes get ? It’s huge, They also use millions of gallons of water and produce deadly waste that has not been safely cleaned or stored and will be deadly for thousands of years.
Renewables and efficiency are the only answers. They are already here we all just have to use them.
My home is grid tied solar and only use elelctric for heating and cooling here in Arizona. I also buy 8 blocks each month of renewable energy from my power utility and never use it. I help they become cleaner. I’ve over 200% clean and green. Just my wife and I in a 10 year old 1600 sq ft 3 db 2 bath home. It’s very possible to be green but you have to want to.
June 14th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
We may need more nukes as a medium term supplement.
I do believe we will eventually be able to generate comparable amounts of electricity using 100% renewables to what we do now, but that is decades off. They say wind can perhaps provide 20% of our needs. And to get to that 20% we need to build windmills up the yin yang. What renewable do we use for the other 80%? Well we get some from hydro, I’m not sure how much, maybe 10%.
In the long run most will need to come from solar. PV or solar thermal.
Bottom line, in the long run we will mainly be relying on solar. But how do we handle the intermittency? You only get full power on a sunny day, and only while the sun is up. As they say, that matches pretty closely with the demand curve for air conditioning, which is good. However, what about charging our EV’s? Well, certainly there should be quick-charging EV’s within 10-15 years so maybe you charge your car while your at work rather than during the night. However, that only works on a sunny day.
And there certainly is a fair amount of power demand in the non sunny hours as well. If long term we are relying primarily on solar, where do we get our power in the evening? Bottom line is I think we will be needing some mass energy storage plants to accompany.
So we have this: In the world of abundant fossil fuels, we run baseload plants all day long (coal and nuclear), run natural gas peaking plants when demand is high, and when demand is low we simply throw away the power that the baseload plants are generating.
In the future we will be relying on renewable plants that supply electricity when they damn well please. So we will need to accompany those with some massive energy storage plants. I don’t see us being able to do that with pumped hydro- there are not the sites available. Maybe the molten sodium stuff they talk about. Maybe use excess wind and solar power to produce hydrogen or some other fuel to use in the off hours. Or, giant batteries. That is probably the best due to the efficiency. And some peopel are talking about using EV’s for that purpose. Will make for an interesting world, you have your car deliver power to the grid at times and charge up the car at others. You will have to be careful to time things so that the car is charged up when you need to drive it.
A world powered by renewable energy will be a very interesting one from a logistical standpiont.
June 14th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
I should amend that, actually, with large scale storage we will presumably be able to get a lot more than 20% of our energy from wind. The 20% limit is what they talk about as far as how much wind power you can simply throw into the existing grid before the intermittency of the wind power causes your power grid to become unreliable. If you have large-scale energy storage plants then that no longer applies.
Besides wind and solar I get the impression that energy sources from the ocean may be able to supply a substantial portion of our electricity needs. However, development of those is at a very early stage. I would think we are looking at 20-30 years before those may be a major energy source.
June 14th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
One thing I wonder:
My impression is that it is the same advances (nanotech enhanced electrodes) that enable batteries to be fast-charged in 5-10 min and also enable batteries to be charged and discharged for many years before degrading.
That makes me wonder- if the A123’s are not fast-charging, are they also quite limited in the number of charge-discharge cycles they can handle? Or am I perhaps mistaken about those two characteristics necessarily going hand in hand?
July 20th, 2008 at 11:29 am
I read all this talk about GM. Isn’t this the same GM that developed a electric car 10 years ago. Built a few hundred of them. Let people drive them who then loved them. So what did GM do take them all back and shred them and build the Hummer instead. That car was the EV1. GM management are retards. Rick Magoner should have been fired by the board. Check out the movie Who Killed The Electric Car?
July 20th, 2008 at 11:31 am
I meant Wagoner.