Alternative Energy

The basic innovation LiIon battery, driven by the company Sony, has surprising, but that is common in innovation, enabled the development of electric cars. 

Previously there were only ugly batteries, some were extremely heavy, lead-acid battery, extremely toxic, nickel cadmium, or other drawbacks why they were not suitable for an energy storage device in a car. This has seduced the automotive industry to believe everything would stay the same and no special attention was given to the development of batteries. 

With the successful development of the Tesla S, an all electric car, everything has changed fundamentally, so I will report here about the importance of battery technology in the automotive industry.

Four things make the value of a car:

The engine remains us to the 19th century. An internal combustion engine with a mean efficiency of about 20 percent, emitting significant amounts of particulate matter and other unhealthy substances, accelerates the car more or less rapidly to cruising speed and keeps on this pace. Thousands of engineers try to optimize this technology with legally or illegal means.

The image of cars of different brands developed by massive advertising budgets [1]. Through product placement in movies and elaborate sales centers, a high value of the car is suggested, although all the cars stuck in traffic driving at the same speed. For many people, the car is next to the house, the most expensive product that is purchased for own appreciation.

The fuel that a car burns in the course of its operational phase of approximately 200,000 miles, may sum up to $ 30,000 (depending on local tax) and is often more expensive as the whole car. In addition, no one knows at the time of car purchase how the gas price will develop. The money end up in the pockets of the oil companies and oil states, not in the automotive industry!

Summarized, the major car makers only have the ability to manufacture engines, the rest of the value chain is lost.

Electric cars have a significantly different distribution to the above points 1 to 4

The glider remains essentially the same, interestingly, the weight saving is less important than with previous cars, because by recuperation (recovery of braking energy). The energy to accelerate and the energy to go uphill is not used for heating the brake disk, as in conventional cars.

The use of non-rusting aluminum is useful because the life of an electric motor is considerably higher than that of an internal combustion engine. And who wants a rusty electric car that still has a good engine and a working battery.

The value of the electric motor is far below of an internal combustion engine, which consists of 6000 moving precision parts. Electric motors are simple, some copper wire winding and an aluminum cylinder which rotates. Rare earths are not necessary, which can only be found in hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius (46kg!).

There is no fuel in the electric car. But we need a battery and electric power to drive the car.The batteries are by far the most expensive part in an electric car and remarkably similar in price compared to the fuel costs of a conventional car.

Amazingly, this was not noticed neither by the big oil companies nor the major car companies. Exception: Tesla builds a Gigafactory, a battery factory which can supply batteries for about 500,000 electric cars a year, thus making the company independent from other suppliers.

Only the German company Volkswagen has announced that it is considering $ 11.000.000.000 to invest in the construction of a battery company (GAS2) Unfortunately, I have heard such announcements in the area of e-mobility by automotive companies several times. Actual, so far nothing was created.

The "fuel" power would actually be a clear claim for the utilities or oil companies. Here there is complete silence.

The common theme in the discussion about electric cars is the battery problem. It involves at least three subjects

Prices of batteries are in free fall. On the picture you can see a slide that has been shown on the Menasol 2016 Energy Conference in Dubai. Compared to the drop in solar cell price, the price of LiIon batteries appear to move even more quickly down.

About half a million years ago, mankind started to manage the energy of fire. The first use of open fire was for heat production and cooking. Since three thousand years fire could be kept in a stove to use the energy more efficient. During the 17 Century, the incredible story of mechanical energy production by the use of fire within steam engines and internal combustion machines began.

This glorious historical period will come to an end, very soon!

There are at least three big problems when we use fire to generate useful energy.

All the little and large fires in our engines have only one reason, they should generate mechanical energy and this energy is sometimes converted to electrical energy. This is possible due to the thermodynamic law of physics. But this law tell us, that the efficiency is always low and needs always a cold reservoir like a river or fresh air. This is the reason, that most of the energy is lost in heat, leaving the car through the exhaust pipe or the radiator. The situation in large conventional power plants is similar.

The famous Durango Silverton narrow gauge steam train.

Since Benjamin Franklins work in the 19. Century, we are aware, that electricity is the ultimate useful medium for energy. We can convert electricity in just any service we can imagine. About 60% of the electrical energy ends up in an electric motor to move people, cool air, transport stuff and cut wood.

Not one of this tasks requests a fire, but we had no other solution till now, so we used a fire to solve the problem.

There is just no single technology that produces as much unhealthy substances as fire. There exist people who inhale the smoke intentional, but most of us try hard to avoid the smoke. We have this smoke detectors on the ceiling and we have different filters in our cars and in coal power plants.

Smoke detector, we try to avoid smoke

When we look to China, a day in Peking is like smoking a packet of cigarettes. But even if we live in modern industrialized countries we have to inhale nano particles of all kind due to the burning of gas, oil and coal. To give an exact value of lost live due to fire is very difficult, but it surpasses nuclear power by many orders of magnitude.

A second trend is, that electricity is stored in batteries. We are used to mobile phones which need every night a charging. Many of our appliances like screw driver and tooth brush use batteries.
The next big step is the electric car, the definite way to extinguish fire. The visionary Elon Musk buildt a car with batteries from the laptop. Today TESLA sells the model S on a ever growing rate.
More batteries will come. As far as I know no other factory type expands faster than the battery production plants with the Giga Factory on top. Read also: Storage Maters.

Largest production site ever for a small product! Source TESLA

More than 50 GWh of batteries should leave the Giga Factory every year. But this is not sufficient to meet the demand of 90 000 GWh of storage for a clean future. Complete new technologies like the Hydraulic Rock Storage are invented, which can store many GWh in one site with very low environmental impact.

Will fire stay  

We will never extinguish fire for ever, because people like fire.

We love fire

But hidden fire for old machinery invented in the 19. Century will go forever, even hydrogen. It was a funny time of smoking stem engines and high factory chimneys. A world of dark snow in the winter and dirty ash.

Have a clean time.

* How we calculate the number of ignitions in combustion machines. There is only a rough approximation possible. The amount of fuel that goes every year into combustion machines is 2 Billion tonnes. Within a combustion machine about 10 Milligram of fuel is burned during a "standard" cycle within one cylinder. Dividing the two numbers results in 2*10E17 ignitions per year or about 7 Billions per second.