Comments on: Lithium-ion Battery War

By: Ionic Foot Bath

Ionic Foot Bath — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 22:57:13 +0000

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By: Peter

Peter — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 16:31:13 +0000

I meant Wagoner.

By: Peter

Peter — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 16:29:48 +0000

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?

By: lance

lance — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 00:28:02 +0000

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?

By: lance

lance — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 00:24:32 +0000

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.