Ceramic battery may replace gas engines by 2008

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Phenom

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Texas company is working on an "energy storage" device made from ceramics. It's not technically a battery because it doesn't use chemicals. It can allegedly charge within 5 minutes with enough energy to move a car 500 miles on about $9 worth of electricity -- about 45 cents a gallon.
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Could this revolutionize cars while also providing a much cleaner and cheaper alternative to oil, or is this just another fool's remedy?
 
Seems a bit too good to be true, and 2008 is definitely too early methinks.
 
Even if the thing is production by next year I suspect it will be prohibitively expensive yet.
Given the rate that technologies are usually adopted I reckon (assuming that it does what they say) its probably more realistic to say that ceramic batteries will replace gas engines by 2028 or beyond.
Which would still be a very good thing.
 
BlueCollar said:
Seems a bit too good to be true, and 2008 is definitely too early methinks.
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Yep. And I think one can easily work out how much energy you can pull from a power socket, and I don't think a normal household socket will cut it for a 5 minute charge.
 
Orangeman said:
Charging should not be a problem. We can always charge it over night, through our existing electric cables or we could even start up high voltage fill-up garages through simply adding high voltage cables to local garages. Or imagine charging external ceramic batteries with any other breakthrough cheap-energy tech, like 'uber-cheap solar cells', to provide cheaper or free energy to your home, and a super quick, home charging station for your car.:cool:
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You'd be a bit screwed in the case of an emergency.

I think probably you'd be able to install a special outlet to your house. Maybe running off a high-amp breaker or something. Any electrical engineers got an idea?

Another thought. What with the electricity shortage we have, that is looking as though it will get a lot worse before it gets better, how wise would it be for South Africa to add transport to the electricity demand for say, the next twenty years.
 
On September 26, 2006, TreeHugger (http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/09/eestor_update.php) writes:

"It's a REALLY BIG dielectric capactor! Running 31F at 3500V in 336 pounds gives them 350Wh/kg. I really hate to think what would happen if a single one of all those parallel dielectrics failed! 52kWh through a short circuit could melt the thing to slag." We certainly wonder what happens when we try to get 52 Kwh out of our house into the car in less than five minutes as Ian claims.
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Ok, so from the above notation someone seems to think that this unit can store 52kWh of energy. Let's work on that figure for now.

52kW hours worth of energy means that you have to pump 52 kilowatts into this thing in an hour to charge it. Now, if you want to do that in 5 mins, you'll have to have something that can give you 624 kW of power..... :eek:

Bear in mind your typical geyser pulls 4 kW...

Also, as this is essentially a huge capacitor, it will have to be charged with DC. So you will need a transformer that will probably be bigger than your yard...

Not exactly feasable at this point in time me thinks..... :o
 
If you're willing to charge for a number of hours it's a little better.
 
Paulr said:
Ok, so from the above notation someone seems to think that this unit can store 52kWh of energy. Let's work on that figure for now.

52kW hours worth of energy means that you have to pump 52 kilowatts into this thing in an hour to charge it. Now, if you want to do that in 5 mins, you'll have to have something that can give you 624 kW of power..... :eek:

Bear in mind your typical geyser pulls 4 kW...

Also, as this is essentially a huge capacitor, it will have to be charged with DC. So you will need a transformer that will probably be bigger than your yard...

Not exactly feasable at this point in time me thinks..... :o
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Doubt you would charge it at home... you would go to a garage to 'fill-up' the battery...

None-the-less, this is all very unlikely to happen.
The only reason we still rely on oil, is that fact that a few people at the top are making sure of that... (yes this sounds like a conspiracy theory) but its true!
Governments like oil, as its easy to tax. The billionaires (from the oil industry) align the pockets of politicians and their political parties, all so they can bribe countries to stay oil dependent!
 
"Sorry honey, I cannot get the kids from school - Escom has load shedded us"
 
Imagine the amount of coal that we are gonna be using to power all these cars. I wonder if the amount of coal pollution will be less than the same amount of normal car emissions. :(
Until we get and build cheap/clean energy power stations we will only be shifting the pollution problem.
 
Nick333 said:
You'd be a bit screwed in the case of an emergency.

I think probably you'd be able to install a special outlet to your house. Maybe running off a high-amp breaker or something. Any electrical engineers got an idea?

Another thought. What with the electricity shortage we have, that is looking as though it will get a lot worse before it gets better, how wise would it be for South Africa to add transport to the electricity demand for say, the next twenty years.
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You'd also be screwed if you were out of petrol in an emergency.
 
oober said:
Imagine the amount of coal that we are gonna be using to power all these cars. I wonder if the amount of coal pollution will be less than the same amount of normal car emissions. :(
Until we get and build cheap/clean energy power stations we will only be shifting the pollution problem.
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There are other options besides coal, like nuclear.
 
phenom said:
Some coal power plants have just recently successfully transfered their CO2 emissions directly from their plant, to large tubes where algae is left in the dun to grow, the algae feeds on the sunlight and CO2 emissions and produces either hydrogen, which could be used for electricity, or oxygen, and this could also be a very cheap food, to speedup the growth of algae, which is could be used as another very promising cleaner biofuel .

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Videos:Algae_as_Fuel

http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php?t=115229

so even coal powerplants could be put to their peak use, so that we could use their smoke to produce clean fuel - there by it is a win-win situation, coal powerplants could be used to grow an cleaner form of fuel, providing an alternative to oil, and thus actually helping in the fight against global warming
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Now thats pretty interesting! Use the coal CO2 to create hydrogen which is used in hydrogen power plants of which the emmissions are H2O which can be used in... hydro-power. We have the power!
 
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