Hard-charging electric vehicles? Do the math!
A couple of people sent me links to an Associated Press story, "Texas Startup Says It Has Batteries Beat."
In the story, AP writer Grant Slater presents the claim by Austin, Texas, start-up EEStor (the company has no Web site yet) that "a motorist could plug in a car for five minutes and drive 500 miles roundtrip between Dallas and Houston without gasoline."
Now, c'mon. This is just not practical. I can say this even though I know nothing about EEStor's technology beyond news reports that it's some kind of high-density capacitor.
It takes about 10 horsepower to keep a regular passenger car moving at highway speeds, overcoming wind and rolling resistance. The energy for the trip works out to 10 times 750 watts times 30,000 seconds (the duration of the trip at 60 mph) or 225 megajoules. Let's just ignore all the efficiency issues-- losses in the capacitor, losses in the electric motors, losses in the cables--and think about that figure.
Putting 225 megajoules into a car in five minutes (300 seconds) requires a power supply of 750 kilowatts. That's a thousand times the power of a high-end gaming PC or a waffle maker.
Let's consider what kind of current this would require. In a U.S. household, the highest voltage available is usually the 240V service for ovens, clothes dryers, and the like. This service is usually limited to about 60 amps...but fast-charging an electric car as we've described would require 3,125 amps. Ready to plug your car into 52 outlets at once?
Any inefficiencies in the system start cranking up that number, and it's already impossibly high. So 240V isn't going to work for anyone, and 480V service--as high as you'll probably ever see in a garage--wouldn't make enough of a difference.
The overhead wires in your neighborhood might be carrying "7200/12470Y" power--three-phase AC with each phase carrying 7,200 volts referenced against a common neutral. The effective voltage is that 12,470 kilovolt figure. Now we're talking, huh? With that kind of service running into your garage...well, you'll never have that kind of service in your garage; it's just too dangerous...With that kind of service available at the neighborhood filling station you could make do with just 60 amps of current on a three-wire cable that would actually bend a little...but switches and connectors for 7,200-volt power are not very practical.
So either we're talking about insanely heavy copper cables or insanely high voltages. I'm sure this is all well-known to the people at EEStor, but they've obviously been seduced by the siren call of the sound bite. That's fine, we know companies sometimes say unbelievable things.
But reporters are supposed to disbelieve unbelievable things. If EEStor said its technology would allow an ordinary automobile to fly from Houston to Dallas, Slater surely would have demanded some backup. This 5-minute charge concept is just as crazy, but he passed it along unquestioned.
This is the one area where gasoline is simply a lot better than electricity. Gasoline contains about 130 megajoules per gallon, and it takes only about 10 seconds to pump a gallon of gas. Even with the very low efficiency of gasoline engines, you can fill a tank a lot faster than a battery or capacitor with the same driving range.
That's an advantage for hybrid cars, but how important is it, really? As long as the range of an electric car is much larger than the distance of a daily commute, and larger than the distance between hotels out on the highway, electric is still a reasonable alternative. A 30-minute charge after a 30-minute commute is easily accomplished with the power from a 240V outlet.
But don't get your hopes up for 5-minute, 500-mile recharges. That's just marketing hype.
Peter N. Glaskowsky is a computer architect in Silicon Valley and a technology analyst for the Envisioneering Group. He has designed chip- and board-level products in the defense and computer industries, managed design teams, and served as editor in chief of the industry newsletter "Microprocessor Report." He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. 
I think you're missing the point, the articles specifically say that you CAN (as in it has the ability to) recharge in 5 minutes, not that you'll be able to at you home. You are correct though in that it would take you a few hours to recharge the unit from your home. If you were to recharge in 5 minutes it would take a special recharging unit with specially cooled copper (and thick) copper cables.
In theory a driver would be able to pull into a recharging station (just like a gas station today) and pay a premium to recharge at a faster rate. For example, you would pay the recharge station a premium of $0.20 to $0.30 per kW-hr over the current power rates (currently about $0.10/kW-hr) for the convenience of recharging quickly. Seems like a good deal all around wouldn't you say??
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What I'm saying is that there's no consumer-grade technology for connecting and disconnecting a 750 kW feed from any source-- the local power plant or an even more local capacitor bank-- to a car. Making and breaking a connection like that is an inherently dangerous process that power companies do only when absolutely necessary. It isn't something that you're going to do twice a day at home in your garage, or even once every two weeks at a local filling station.
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A square meter of solar cells gives up to about 150 watts when aimed directly at the sun on a clear day, but of course the roof of your car isn't aimed so well. You can expect to average about two or three hours' sun per day over the course of a year. So if you do everything right you can get maybe 400 watt-hours of electricity per day during the summer. That'll cover five percent of the energy you consume driving... maybe three percent once all the inefficiencies are accounted for.
It's better than nothing, but not very helpful.
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The electrical cables required to hook these things up will be as thick as your thumbs.
The electrical connectors will require a hefty wrench to detach, and when you separate or reconnect them, they're likely to produce a heck of a spark.
You will NOT be casually swapping out battery packs on an electric car.
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The horsepower figure in the article isn't the best way to figure this, since gas and electric vehicles operate at significantly different efficiencies. A better figure is miles per kilowatt-hour. Most EVs get about 4 to 6 miles/KWH. So 500 miles requires about 100 KWH of electricity. That means, charging for one hour at 480 volts: 100,000 watts divided by 480 equals 208 amps. Divide by the three legs (3 phase) gives us 69 amps per circuit. To do all of this in 5 minutes, multiply by twelve: that's 833 amps.
It's a big number, but that's still within spec for the #00 wiring used in most EVs.
Solution: The customer accepts that a 7-hour recharge time for the vast majority of driving situations is acceptable. This would also limit the drain on the utility to 8000 watts/customer, something the utility would allow without billing a demand (aka FINE), and allowing a customer to keep his residential rate schedule, seeing that the utility would need not need to upgrade their infrastructure. The 33 Amperes @ 240 volts could be supplied by a welder outlet (typically 40-50 amps) that some people already have in their garages.
- by watahh February 21, 2009 5:00 PM PST
- i dont know why youre making it more complicated than it has to be. the 5 minute charge i assume only works at charging stations, not at your house. i would assume that charging at those stations will cost more than charging it at home, but much cheaper than gasoline. if you dont want to pay more for the 5 minute charge then you can do it at your house in a few hours. but i bet most people dont mind paying a reasonable amount more for the convenience, plus most people dont park their car in their garage. Its just like the gas stations we have today but instead of pumping gas, we pump electricty. plus its cheaper than gas and you CAN charge it at home if you want to, its a win win situation. whats with the pessimistic attitude?
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